Being Loyal to Boss Is No Excuse for Doing Wrong

As the Iran- contra hearings resume this week, something in secretary and document shredder Fawn Hall’s testimony before the panel seems a haunting lesson for anyone who works in an office.

Did Hall appreciate the significance of what she was doing when Lt. Col. Oliver L. North asked her to alter top-secret documents and then destroy the originals?

“No I didn’t.”

“Weren’t you curious?” Assistant Senate Counsel Mark Belnick asked.

“It was a policy of mine not to ask questions and just to follow instructions,” Hall answered. “I believed in Col. North and what he was doing. I had no right to question him.”

Either in innocence or deceit, the femme fatale of the Iran-contra scandal has crystallized a moral rationalization apparently too easily accepted today, particularly in the era of insider trading.

Being Loyal to Boss

It might be called the moral cipher argument, and it goes something like this:

Hall decided she was freed from having to make moral judgments about her conduct because she thought she was doing the right thing by being loyal to her boss. And in any case she is just a secretary, not a policy-maker. She was not in charge. It was not her place to make the moral decisions.

Although Hall was engaged in public policy, the moral cipher argument is perhaps even more relevant in private business, where the questions of morality are not so obvious, the object is profit, and the standards restricting its pursuit are relatively loose.

I recall a former boss I deeply respect once offering this advice about the corporate world: “Never complain, never explain.” And, “Never go to the boss with problems, only solutions.”

These axioms are useful and pervasive. But such thinking discourages moral protests and encourages finding ways to avoid them. The insider trading case involving convicted investment banker Dennis B. Levine suggests that an ethos of what one congressman has called moral “non-responsibility” is widespread on Wall Street.

In secret testimony this month, Levine told a congressional oversight committee that on occasion he told superiors at three different investment firms he worked at about imminent takeovers he knew about illegally. They didn’t stop him. They rewarded him with raises.

“You get the feeling that his supervisors would say, ‘Gee whiz,’ and wink and nod,” Rep. Donald Wyden (D-Ore.), said afterward.

This might be considered a hybrid of the moral cipher argument. Trying to buck a corporate ethos that winks at lawbreaking or immorality is only a generalized version of trying to protest against the wrongheaded orders of one’s superior. The problem is, the moral cipher argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. At bottom, using loyalty or one’s rank in the office as a reason not to raise objections to ethical problems is a crutch to avoid dealing with our confused ethical feelings, or worse, a way to deceive others about our real motives.

“She is only a secretary,” one might argue. “You can’t really expect her to have stopped her boss.”

It seems reasonable, but it is wrong. The reason is that the essence of morality is that it is a matter of individual conscience. At the moral divide we are alone, for only we can account for our actions. That is why ethics is so difficult.

It also is one of the burdens of democracy: Low status does not absolve us of the freedom and duty to choose; high status does not allow us to rise above it.

And we do not leave that responsibility outside the office door, even though raising objections to a boss’ plan can be dangerous. Fine, in the abstract, one might say. But Hall thought she was being loyal, too, which is also something to believe in. Well, the most difficult moral decisions are always those balanced against some other value, such as loyalty, ambition or line of command.

This one, however, should not be so hard. Loyalty and duty to professional superiors are not really moral values at all and should not be confused with loyalty and duty to moral principle. In Fawn Hall’s case, loyalty to Ollie North is less important than loyalty to the law and the Constitution.

Certainly prudence requires one to pick one’s battles. Yet moral courage means sensing which fights transcend compromise. That is the final ingredient of heroism.

Take the recent case of a secretary at a private investigations firm in a major Midwestern city, a woman who is a board member of the local chapter of Nine to Five, a trade group for working women. She has asked that her name and city not be identified.

Her boss repeatedly asked her to pad the firm’s expense accounts so he could overbill clients. She repeatedly refused. Eventually, the requests stopped, and despite her fears, she has suffered no consequences.

In the end, absolving one of moral responsibility because of rank or loyalty is wrong because it fails the test of reality. Again, Hall’s testimony is revealing.

She testified, for instance, that after she knew what her boss wanted, she used her own initiative to destroy phone logs and smuggle top secret documents out of the White House. In the name of personal loyalty and duty, Hall said later, there are “times when you have to go above the written law.” She also tried to lecture members of Congress on foreign policy.

In doing so, Hall revealed the fallacy of the moral cipher argument. She was not, as she tried to suggest, merely a secretary. Of course not. No one is merely his or her title. No one can really be a moral cipher.

That is why the moral cipher argument is a cheat. “I was loyally following orders” becomes an excuse to ignore the nagging, difficult, ambiguous pangs of conscience. It is a moral crutch, and it cripples us ethically.

It can also be something worse: a deception. Don’t consider me for what I am, one so ambitious or ideological that I thought myself above the law.

Instead, believe that I made an honest mistake. I chose the wrong moral alternative, loyalty and duty. Or perhaps believe that the system made me do it. Business engenders deceit. I was just playing the game.

At one point in the Iran-contra hearings, the questioner detected that even Hall was having trouble maintaining her moral cipher pose.

“You were uneasy while you were making changes (in secret documents), weren’t you?” he asked.

“I felt a little bit of uneasiness when he asked me to do it. But again, as I’ve stated, I believe in Colonel North, and I know that there must have been a good reason why he was asking me to do this . . . And I, I did as I was told.”

That isn’t good enough, no matter what your job.