You've Got to Be Kidding!: How to Keep Your Job Without Losing Your Integrity

A Few Definitions

Before we proceed, I want to share my definitions for values, morals, and ethics. These terms are commonly used interchangeably since they each provide behavioral rules. However, you have to appreciate their distinctions to understand why good people sometimes behave badly. So let’s split a few hairs:

Values by themselves are not a matter of good versus bad, moral versus immoral, or ethical versus unethical. Our values are personal; we choose and assign to them varying degrees of importance. Not all are equal, and they change as we grow and encounter various life experiences. Some of our values might be qualities like comfort, stress, accountability, friendship, security, honesty, stability, achievement, status, autonomy, loyalty, competition, cooperation; it’s a long list. But whatever values we choose, those that are most important to us are essentially what define us.

Morals are the principles of a person’s character that are deemed “right” or “good” according to a community’s standards. We learn morals when we are very young, and they do not change. Ethics describes the social system—like your office—in which those morals are applied. Ethics usually refers to a set of rules or expectations that are accepted by a group of people, whereas a person’s morals stay private. A useful way to think about how morals and ethics relate is this: We accept our morals and choose our ethics based on our values.

These distinctions allow us to talk confidently about social, ...