INDIVIDUAL or THE GROUP?, THE

Accountancy SA,  Sep 2007  by Prozesky, Martin

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An ethical professional in any field should first and foremost be a good human being. This month's article picks up that principle by exploring a dilemma that anybody could confront. But the same dilemma also challenges accountants who become business people in their own right, or the financial managers and advisors to such business people. It asks them what they would do in the following situation.

Buddy is a 10-year-old boy from an impoverished single-parent home. Before his workless and often drunken father walked out for good, he used to beat the kid at the slightest opportunity. Buddy starts taking out his anger and hurt on smaller boys, cornering such kids and beating them up. One day things get dreadfully out of hand when a victim called Jimmy tries to fight back by biting his tormentor. Buddy goes beserk. He picks up a large stone and smashes it repeatedly into the little fellow's face and head, and then leaves him prone and bleeding copiously, his rage having burnt itself out.

By the time Jimmy is found it is too late. He dies shortly afterward from those massive head injuries. Buddy is quickly identified as the culprit taken from his home and ordered by a juvenile court to remain in protective care till he turns eighteen. Meanwhile the story makes first local and then national and even international headlines, ensuring that a shocked country knows all about Buddy and his victim.

The years pass and Buddy, now a strapping six-footer, is soon to turn 18. He has been lucky. The centre he was sent to had excellent child psychologists on its staff. They worked long and hard to help him find his way to a worthwhile future, gradually building up his self-respect and ensuring that his education continued. During those years he developed an interest in becoming a builder and was taught some useful basics, in time becoming a very good brick-layer.

As Buddy's eighteenth birthday approached there was intense discussion by the authorities about what should happen to him next It was decided that, in view of his identity being known, it would be best if he were given a new name and identity, and a job with a sympathetic builder be sought for him in another part of the country.

You are the owner of a construction company in a city far from Buddy's home town. You are a decent person who believes everybody should have a chance in life. When you are approached by the child welfare agency that looks after Buddy's interests, you recall those newspaper headlines and the terrible event they reported, but you also feel an immediate sympathy for Buddy, who is now named Bill. The experts say he Is long over the emotional mess that child-abuse, rage and violence produced in him as a kid, and that he is ready to start a new life, free of violence and backed up by appropriate counselling.

But then you think of your existing staff. While none of them would know about Bill's past, you know the kind of banter and teasing that goes on at construction sites, and the occasional minor conflicts. What if Bill, now a big, strong chap, gets provoked by some persistent banter and something snaps in him, triggering another bout of violent and perhaps even fatal rage?

You struggle with this decision. What comes first, the right of every individual to a decent chance in life, or the right of your team of workers to a workplace free of even a small, foreseeable chance of serious violence?

We have here the third of the "right-right' ethical dilemmas that are highlighted by the work of Dr Rush Kidder and his associates at the Institute for Global Ethics in the USA: individual versus community. Especially in the West, the rights of the individual are often seen as paramount, and too much emphasis on the community is sometimes dismissed as a hang-over of socialism. But you don't have to get your bearings from Karl Marx to know that it is good to protect the communities we live and work in - homes, neighbourhoods, teams, colleagues, employees and the like.

As you wrestle with the request to give Bill a chance in life, you feel acutely the clash of these two goods - individual and group. Which should take precedence in this situation? What if you give Bill a job and things go terribly wrong? How can that be fair to his victim? But if nobody gives Bill a chance, might he not relapse into despair and rage, and attack the first person who gets under his skin, perhaps fatally?

When we grapple with tough ethical dilemmas we need more than gut feeling. We need the views of wise colleagues, and some of us turn to spiritual sources of help. And all of us need sound ethical guidelines.

The world's great ethical teachers, philosophies and traditions give their followers and members various guidelines, but so far nobody has convinced the entire world that there is a single, supreme principle that always works. The closest we get is the famous Golden Rule, present in all the great value-systems in one form or another. In South Africa the version familiar to most of us is "Do to others as you would have them do to you".