How To Make Ethical Decisions

Important, Not Important

Has there ever been a more important time, a more consequential time, to lead with ethics?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Susan Liautaud. Susan is the author of The Power of Ethics and of the Little Book of Big Ethical Questions.

She teaches cutting-edge ethics courses at Stanford University. She is the Chair of the Council Trustees at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She's the Vice Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, and is Chair of the Stanford University Freeman's Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Council.

She also serves with the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence, which is obviously really important, and the AI Ethics Advisory Panel. Other boards include Benevolent AI, the Yale Divinity School Advisory Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among many others.

Her work and her frameworks reverberate through so many decision-making apparatuses today. I have been trying to learn from and operate from Susan's work personally and in this work for a long time because it's easy to feel incapable, not skilled enough, or not practiced enough in this moment of big decisions.

This moment, at the intersection of technology and society and personal impact where a better, healthier, cleaner future, however imperfect, is within our hands, will require each of us to adopt and then practice a framework to consider who we want to be and who we see ourselves as, and then what that means in practice in each situation, on a day to day level, and when we're faced with the big stuff.

A framework that interrogates the information available to us, that honestly asks who could be affected by our decisions, including ourselves, and what would it be like to be affected by our decision, now and way down the line.

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INI Book Club:

• The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Read Susan's books The Power of Ethics and The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions
• Connect with Susan on LinkedIn

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• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Produced by Willow Beck
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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