Ethics is Leadership Work; HuffingtonPost.com, 10/31/13

Terry Newell, HuffingtonPost.com; Ethics is Leadership Work: "Pressed in recent days on his reaction to the revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on the personal phone calls of the leaders of friendly governments, President Obama remarked that it is obvious that "what we could do is not necessarily what we should do." From a president who launched his first administration with a clarion call for more ethical governance, it's disconcerting that his NSA team missed this core distinction. That distinction is the classic definition of an ethical dilemma. What you can do is not always what you should do - capability is not character. Nor is this a question of what is legal. It does not appear that the NSA did anything illegal. But not everything that is legal is ethical. Jim Crow laws were legal until the 1960s. Male-only job postings in newspapers were legal even longer. But they were not ethical."