EXPLANATION AND JUSTIFICATION

Leaders often act as though they have their own code of ethics. Actions that are wrong for the rest of us, it seems, can be right for them. One way to think about this phenomenon is to understand leadership ethics in terms of the theory of moral relativism. This is the view that what is right or wrong differs either from person to person or from society to society. Applied to leadership ethics, this view of morality permits leaders to act as they or their cultures see fit. In other words, a leader – as an individual or as a member of a particular society – can claim justification “because he has his own morality.”

We can call the first version personal relativism and the second version cultural relativism. Personal relativism privileges the moral beliefs of the individual, whereas cultural relativism yields to the moral commitments within a person's society. For both versions of this theory, morality is determined by reference to the beliefs of particular people, not by reference to some objective standard. What is right or wrong is a matter of subjective perceptions, either at the individual or at the collective level. For example, relativism holds that lying can be moral for some individuals but immoral for other individuals, or that lying can be permissible in one culture but impermissible in another culture.