Slow ethics provides for a more sustainable and tempered approach to professional ethics. It would go beyond simple monomaniacal explanations, quick fixes and single values and algorithms. It would involve learning from the past, appreciating complexity and taking time to critically interrogate concepts, explanations and recommendations relating to unethical practices. Insights gleaned from the Leveson and Francis inquiries, for example, are invaluable. Slow ethics would highlight the “upstream” work that needs to be done to prepare young people to join our professions. It would require the institutionalisation – indeed normalisation – of space, time and coaching so that people more fully understand the implications of their actions and omissions; actions and omissions that can result in distress, humiliation and even death. It would go beyond performance management that focuses on technical competence, and instead engage meaningfully with humanistic dimensions of practice.
Times Higher Education – Slow ethics will tackle moral winter.