Excerpts from
The 5 Questions for Ethical Decisions: How to Succeed Without Selling Your Soul
By David W. Miller with Susan Richardson
Princeton University Press, April 2026
From the Introduction (p8):
I am assuming that you are ethical and strive to remain that way. Foundational to this book is the belief that most of us are not at either ethical extreme; we are neither saints, whose decisions are always faultless, nor the few “bad apples” acting from a place of malice. Instead, most of us think of ourselves as generally good people, not always perfect but trying to do the best we can with all the things that life can throw at us. In other words, we mostly fall into what I call the Moveable Middle. Imagine an ethical bell curve with a small percentage of saints at one end and villains at the other. I am neither of those extremes, and I’ll wager you aren’t either or else you wouldn’t be reading this book. Most of us fall in the middle somewhere, capable of being ethical and yet also vulnerable to lapses for any number of reasons—we who have good days and bad days, who never set out to be unethical but over time may have found ourselves in unexpected circumstances or situations that we’d never run into before, that have quick turnarounds for a decision, that come at times of unusual pressure in our lives, or with which we simply have no experience. Many of us, at one time or another, found ourselves halfway down a slippery slope that we did not see coming, perhaps one to which our own pressures or biases led us. Or it may be we did see it coming but didn’t have the guts or guidance to avert a disaster. We’ve probably all witnessed someone having to step down in
embarrassment and incur great familial or financial loss, and we don’t want to be the next one.
From the Introduction (p12):
In these normal ethical and reputational tripwires of life, those of us in the Moveable
Middle need a sturdy, reliable ethical framework as part of our normal “operating system,” one that lies beyond whatever might be tugging at us in the moment and helps us get to know ourselves better over time.
- 196
By naming the things that can derail us, we can better avoid them. We can take action to cultivate self-awareness and actions to insulate us from our subconscious selves and help find “the better angels of our nature,” in the final words of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861. In health and wellness, physical fitness comprises several domains and activity, including diet, muscle strength and tone, cardio exercises, flexibility, mental strength and focus, and so on. Elite athletes develop strategies to tend to each of those components of their fitness. Similarly, ethical fitness in the workplace and in life has individual components that need special attention. I like to think of work itself as having three dimensions, namely, the work itself, the worker, and the workplace. What follows is a range of ethical fitness exercises and tools that affects all these domains. And in each of these modes of work, we’ll consider a range of habits, rituals, and reminders that I use myself and have learned from others.
From the Introduction (pp1-2):
Our focus is to empower by giving you the tools to bring that range of factors to greater awareness and intention so that your final choice and its consequences can be as sound as possible… and you can feel as peaceful as possible in retrospect. Decisions have consequences, from small to great, positive to negative, and personal to financial and reputational. As we will discuss more later, we can easily find ourselves grappling with tricky situations such as conflict of interest, whistleblowing, sexual or financial misconduct, accepting job offers and then reneging, lying or bluffing, discrimination, and needing to restore broken trust. These may be on a larger scale, but they also happen in all kinds of smaller ways throughout our regular workdays—probably more than we realize at first. And often, we simply find ourselves in the ethical gray zone, where even with all good intentions, we don’t know what the best ethical choice is for the best outcome.
From the Introduction (p16):
To me, ethics is not simply about laws and compliance. Rather, it’s also about character (yours) and culture (your organization’s). This is not to take away from compliance officers and departments; indeed, hopefully, it will affirm their importance as one piece in the larger picture. Compliance departments and guidelines are necessary but not sufficient. They tend to look backward, focused on catching those who’ve violated laws and regulations, whereas ethics understood as character and culture is focused on avoiding future mistakes. Law, codes, and policy are an important place to begin, but we need to use other ethical perspectives as well. Similarly, ethics is not merely about telling people to be “good” or “moral,” an approach that can be misleading and unhelpful. First, telling someone just to “be moral” can put inordinate pressure on them without giving them the tools they need to fulfill the expectation. And telling people to be good can also be interpreted in too many different ways. More helpful is an approach that helps you identify ethical problems as such and know your own ethical sources and tools for making an ethical decision. Such an approach helps you be better able to imagine possible outcomes, either positive or negative, and see yourself working through them.
- 205
Ancient wisdom faith traditions, like the Abrahamic religions discussed in chapter 2, can help you make ethical choices and make up for ethical lapses in a range of ways. It may be that one is already a source you actively engage in, privately or more publicly in a worship community. Or perhaps it is a more distant one, layered into your family’s past, and you may not actively practice the religion anymore but you are still motivated, perhaps even subconsciously, by some of its core principles and teachings. I know many people who self-describe as being, for instance, a lapsed Catholic or a nonpracticing Jew who nonetheless cherish the ethical teachings from their religious heritage, even though they no longer accept the doctrine associated with it. Or if there isn’t a past or present religious faith in your life, you might still take some learnings from one of the religious languages that have evolved over millennia of human struggle, suffering, temptation, and joy. For instance, looking at their sacred writings, such as Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita or the Pali canon in Buddhism, or rituals, such as the Jewish weekly Shabbat or Christianity’s Sabbath rest, may offer teachings and stories about the struggle to do the right thing and practices that can help keep you on track. In particular, religious ideals and cautions can help when it comes to detaching from the triggers of the present and keeping an eye to the long view.
From the Introduction (pp3-4):
Our ethical choices aren’t as freely made as we think they are, and our human decision-making processes are even more fragile. A decision may seem as though it is about a particular moment in time, but it involves the whole person, even the things we might be less aware of—past, present, and future (more on that later). As we sort through a decision, feelings and motivations may come into play, many of which are affected by biases and triggers of all kinds, both conscious and unconscious. Those in turn can impact the soundness and clarity of our decision-making—particularly if the triggers remain unconscious. One of my hopes with this book is to help you unpack what might be behind some of your thoughts and feelings so that bias doesn’t remain unconscious. And I also hope to offer techniques to help you better understand your motivations—even readers who have already done a fair amount of work on that—so that your values can remain steady and consideration of context does not result in ethical relativity and rationalization.
Our ethical decisions shape us over time, but they also shape the world around us. So the greater our awareness of our decision-making habits and the more intentional our processes are for making decisions, the stronger our track record will be and, not only that but, the greater integrity our lives will have. As ethicist and educator Mary C. Gentile writes, in Giving Voice to Values, “Discover and believe you have a choice about voicing values by examining your own track record. Know what has enabled and disabled you in the past, so you can work with and around these factors. And recognize, respect, and appeal to the capacity for choice in others.”
. Or as my friend Bob Murley, vice chairman and senior adviser of UBS, says, “It’s easy to determine whether you like someone. It takes a little longer to determine whether you respect someone. But it takes a very long time to determine whether you trust someone. It’s a much higher bar. I’ve always tried, to the best of my capability, to give people the best advice for them, even if it wasn’t necessarily in my own interests, because that’s how you build a trusted relationship.” Often—probably most of the time, if we’re honest—our decisions both reflect the values we have shaped over the course of our lives and pay those values forward into the future, like the ripples created when you toss a stone into a pond. As my wife, Karen, has said, it’s not only about what you do in a situation but what you inspire someone else to do.
- 209 – 212
Ttools for ethical fitness and the awareness (we) need to have lived a life of meaning, purpose, and integrity is where we make the larger shift from simply having a conscience to developing greater consciousness, from just being reactive to finding deeper meaning and developing maturity.
As the late Clayton Christensen has put it, how will you measure your life?
In Christensen’s article—tellingly subtitled “Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career”—he discusses the most important points he wanted students to take away from business school, and they weren’t financial engineering or supply-chain skills. Instead, there were three key questions he wanted students to remember: How can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? And how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?
Christensen answers the third question using the analogy of marginal costs from the business world. We often use it unconsciously, he says, when choosing between right and wrong in our personal lives. “A voice in our head,” he writes, “says, ‘Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.’” We don’t look at where the path is taking us and the full cost it entails. “Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of ‘just this once.’” “Just this once” can lead to a series of seemingly small ethical errors that allow for more and more rationalization, causing your ethical framework to weaken. The life lesson he feels he has learned is that “it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.”
The excerpts, provided above, are from the book, The 5 Questions for Ethical Decisions: How to Succeed Without Selling Your Soul, by David W. Miller with Susan Richardson (Princeton University Press, April 2026). They are included here by the explicit written permission of the authors. For further information, contact susanrichardson@princeton.edu