22 Global Ethics for Leadership
1.7 Why Do People Not Like to Talk About Values
and Virtues?
Ethics is taught by specialists and learned by students at universities
and colleges. Sometimes the subject is left to religious learning. Why
then are people feeling insecure and visibly resisting talking about and
dialoguing on values, virtues and ethics?
One reason might be that the education of ethics is missing or values
are so personal that people do not like to let others come to close to learn
about their thinking and feelings. I think it is key that the education of
ethics starts and is lived in the families. Parents have to accomplish an
important task. Ethics should be a learning subject across the school-
based educational courses, and the learning of ethics as well as the
strengthening of intercultural competences should be part of the teaching
curricula in advanced primary and secondary classes, high school, col-
leges and universities.
Switzerland is often proclaiming itself as being a nation of will (only
the will to be together is uniting, not language, religion, natural bounda-
ries, etc.). It is regularly an issue to emphasize Swissness. But what does
that mean?
Those discussions go from quality to innovativeness, from ingenuity
to timeless learning, applauding the dual system of vocational training
and of being reliable in doing business, etc. But we rarely hear political
parties talking about values. Maybe it would be good to have such dis-
cussions from time to time to rediscover values or to create new values
giving people and citizens more indications on what counts and what is
less important.
Talking to managers about ethics, I often felt a considerable hesita-
tion to address those issues. Reasons for it may be bad consciousness or
not seeing any economic added value in ethics or shyness that personal
shortcomings could appear? Or is ethics to close to moralizing or bring-
ing religions too obviously into the context? Or is it simply not the right