2010 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Sunday, April 11: Rushworth Kidder

Rush Kidder’s calling is to help people make better, more ethical decisions in every aspect of life.  Through his lively, compelling, real-life stories, he illustrates the fact that our toughest choices are not matters of right versus wrong but of right versus right.  Using a robust, straightforward framework for discussing ethics, he brings an uncommon clarity to the complexities of ethical decision-making.  In books, lectures, seminars, and frequent news commentary, he gives us a common language and a methodology for analyzing situations where two values are in conflict.  The goal is to develop Ethical Fitness®—a term so particular that he has had to have it registered.

The Library Journal, reviewing his 2005 book Moral Courage, observed that “Kidder links sophisticated theory and research with colorful, sometimes gripping examples of people displaying the ‘courage to be moral,’” and noted that “this book, like one candle in the darkness, belongs in every place of learning – and every library.”  David Abshire, former US Ambassador to NATO, writes that “Character is tested in moral dilemmas, and Rush Kidder brilliantly deals with the perilous pathways where moral courage is absolutely required.” 

Kidder’s latest book, just published in 2009, is The Ethics Recession. In this timely and insightful book, Rush argues that what started as an economic recession has become an ethics recession—a full-blown collapse of integrity and responsibility that is now shaping the way we need to think about and respond to this crisis. 

A graduate of Amherst College with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he appears monthly as part of an ethics panel in O: The Oprah Magazine, and places op-ed pieces in such periodicals as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe.

Kidder has worked for more than seventeen years to refine his guidelines for ethical decision-making through his Institute for Global Ethics, a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank
headquartered in Rockland, Maine.  Through extensive, around-the-world, research-based interviews, surveys and focus groups, the Institute for Global Ethics is finding that, despite different cultures, religions and political systems, people worldwide tend to agree on five core, shared values: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness and compassion.