Agency and Katz’s Ethic of Expediency: Why Is It So Difficult to Do the Right Thing?

Few people wake up and decide to be unethical or think themselves to be, but the habit of cutting corners in the short term and rationalizing that behavior in the service of expediency builds to larger exceptions that become harder to resist when more significant moral agency is required. Moral agency is the ability to make ethical decisions and take appropriate action based on what is right or wrong. It is not easy.

Once students become working professionals, there are more pressures to act unethically with higher stakes and impacts for others than as a student. In his seminal work, “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust,” Steven Katz (1992) explains by prioritizing expediency, speed, efficiency, profits, and innovation, over human considerations, can perpetuate unethical and even fatal situations: “But to some extent, technological (i.e., economic) expediency is the “moral” basis of many decisions/actions in our society that sometimes harm human welfare or imperil human life.” Even though Katz wrote his article in 1992, he notes a similar example of expediency regarding airlines: “A recent example would be the decision not to notify the public of the bomb threat to Pan Am Airlines to keep the airlines operating; in December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded over Locherbee, Scotland, killing all two hundred and seventy people on board” (p. 270). Though the situations are different in nature and decades apart, both airlines prioritized expediency over human safety, which is in direct violation of the first ethical code for engineers (EGBC 2023), and many other professions. It seems that the moral agency to prevent the repetition of such prioritization was lacking despite historical evidence of how these situations can turn out when expediency is prioritized.

Strength of character rooted in an identity, not mere belief, is required to move people to act with moral agency in the face of authorities’ insistence on expediency over human needs. Many assume that when the pressure is on in these situations, they will “do the right thing” but it has been shown that it isn’t that simple. In the infamous Milgram experiment, it was shown that in the face of an authority figure it is often people’s default mode is to “follow orders” even when they know they could be hurting another person.^[1] The ability to act ethically even in the face of an authority figure pressuring one to act unethically, seemingly increasingly shocking and hurting their fellow participant, required a high level of moral agency to refuse and argue with the authority figure (Gibson 2019). The level of moral agency under such pressure can be presumed to be in part because of their identity, they couldn’t reconcile the action with their perception of themselves and rationalize it.

For example, few engineers questioned the rushed process of the doomed redesign of the Boeing 737 Max: “Despite the intense atmosphere, current and former employees said, they felt during the project that Boeing’s internal quality checks ensured the aircraft was safe” (Gelles et al 2019). It is difficult to have the moral agency to defy authority figures, in this case their employers a reputable company, who are pressuring them to deliver at an unreasonable pace for quality work.