The Toolbox

Ethics and Social Change

“Senseless Kindness,” a performance with dancers Alison McWhinney, Isaac Hernandez, Francesco Gabriele Frola, and Emma Hawes of the English National Ballet

Photo by Dylan Martinez

Do the right thing

“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter I had meant to ask him the same question.

Again, and as ever, as may be seen above, the most pressing questions are naive ones.

Wisława Szymborska

Social change is a tangle of ethical puzzles. As we work to build a better world, we find ourselves confronted with human complexity: different people have different beliefs about what is right; different perspectives offer different understanding; different choices lead to different outcomes.

While this book is oriented towards people who want to build a better world, the tools themselves are ethically neutral. They do not include a hidden check on intentions—or on outcomes. Smart strategy can reduce poverty, or it can concentrate wealth. Insights into human behavior can be used to build agency or manipulate minds. Storytelling can set the stage for justice or for genocide.

Our task is to put these tools to good work. Social change requires strategic flexibility, as described in the previous chapter, and ethical constancy, as explored in this one. As the activist Shira Hassan says, social change can be “a mutable process with only its values set in stone.” ...