This should unsettle every CEO who has ever nodded approvingly at claims that their team is “doing the right thing” or has endorsed the slide broadcasting their company values, the one that asserts they’re committed to “do the right thing”.
The moral intention may be admirable, but so many businesses have made the exact same claim it’s become a cliche.
Deloitte declares they “serve with integrity”. Their Global Chief Ethics Officer translates this as their decisions are rooted in “doing the right thing”. Boeing, despite recent noise about favouring cost over safety, claim they “do the right thing” as part of their Trust value. Even Google is now committed to “do the right thing” rather than “don’t be evil”.
Whether it’s professional services, aerospace, consumer goods, rail, hospitality, travel, financial infrastructure or consumer manufacturing organisations after organisation wants to create the perception that they operate with ethical maturity and should therefore be trusted.
But who says what the right thing really is?
Six completely different people with six totally different justifications, and every single one of them would pass a lie detector test if you asked them, "are you doing the right thing?"
"Do the right thing" isn't a value. It's a container. And what fills that container is entirely determined by the legitimising authority we use to decide what counts as “right” in the first place.
Most organisations, who claim that they “do the right thing”, have never debated where their moral authority comes from.
So, let’s unpack where any organisations ethical authority might come from.
Moral reasoning develops. It isn't fixed, and it isn't taught in a single afternoon workshop.
Lawrence Kohlberg's original research on moral development, was refined and extended by developmentalists like Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter and Ken Wilber into the broader architecture of adult development. All this work converges on the same finding:
as a person matures, the source of legitimacy they appeal to when deciding what's “right” changes, in a predictable sequence, through increasingly sophisticated territory.
Put simply: "do the right thing" always has a silent second half. "According to whom?" And the answer to that second half changes completely as a person develops.
We believe that it’s now possible to define 12 levels of moral reasoning. All these can be assessed, and each level has a different legitimising agent.
Level 1 is amoral because it’s characterised by the abdication of moral agency altogether. Right and wrong has been totally surrendered to an external authority. The motivation is simple obedience to avoid punishment. The defence is “It's not my fault; I was just doing what I was told."
At levels 2-4 the self becomes the legitimising agent. Right is whatever serves my interests, my advantage, my position. It's not malicious, it's simply that the compass hasn't yet developed a needle that points anywhere beyond "me." Level 2 is pure self-interest where an individual decides themselves what is right and wrong based on their own desire without feeling the need to be answerable to anyone. Level 3 operates with righteous self-interest. If I can justify what I’m doing, then that makes it OK. This is where “might is right” sits. At level 3 there may be some understanding of the damage or hurt that is created but it is justified anyway. At level 4 there is careful self-interest. At this level the defence is “I can still do what I want so long as it’s not hurting anyone”.
At level 5-7 the legitimising authority moves outside the self. There is agency here, which is what distinguishes it from level 1, but the agency sits outside of us. We embrace, and partly own, our decisions which are legitimised by an external agent.
Initially, at Level 5, this means passive social compliance. The person has taken ownership of a rule they didn't originate, and experiences it as their own, not the imposition of level 1, but acceptance of the rule handed to them by family or tribal elders, a professional body, a boss, the system, God or government. This is where the law of the land and regulatory compliance sits.
This is the ethnocentric stage, and it's where an enormous number of otherwise capable adults spend their entire working lives. The definition of “right” is whatever the authority figure, the rulebook, or the in-group says it is. It's stable, it's loyal, and it's also precisely why so many corporate scandals end with someone insisting they were only following the what the culture, the code or the boss above them said.
Someone operating at Level 6 moral reasoning is no longer just deferring to the fixed code of the previous level. Individuals at this level are skilled social pleasers who actively court and embrace the norms of the people around them, because doing so builds the relationships and the standing they want. Ownership at this level is expressed through skilful participation, not passive acceptance. Protection is the product of actively cultivated goodwill, not an automatic entitlement of membership. This is the level of mutuality and partnerships.
Moral reasoning at Level 7 is still ethnocentric but it now involves rationality. It is a formalised and systematic maturation of level 6’s subjective and interpersonal experience. There is a rational-institutional process, rather than an unspoken social code. Level 7 is not the standard professional courtesy typical of level 6. It’s rational peer review that enables a profession to self-regulate.
It would be comforting to think that "bad actors", the ones who commit war crimes, cover up institutional child abuse, distribute products known to cause harm, engineer corporate fraud, cover up safety breaches, drive wrongful convictions, profit from systemic financial exploitation, damage the environment, or exploit workers through bonded labour, only operate from the first four, self-interested levels. They don't. Some of the most damaging organisational harm in this article, and in the history books, comes from Levels 5 to 7. These weren't people serving their own interest. They were people whose group, code, or industry had already told them the harm they were doing was "right".
For the few that reach Level 8 moral reasoning there is a significant leap forward in complexity, because there’s a recognition of the multiple context and multiple systems that determine what may be considered right and wrong. The legitimising authority no longer comes from a single group, but from the multiplicity of groups and all the perspectives they create. This moves moral reasoning from ethnocentric to world centric. What’s right becomes whatever the widest stakeholder-weighted consensus, across every group and perspective in play, can agree to live with.
There are four more levels of moral reasoning beyond level 8. Each new level gets it legitimacy from a wider, more systemic authority, until its legitimacy no longer belongs to any single group's perspective at all and starts belonging to something closer to life, or evolution, itself.
We won't map that territory in detail here; it gets complicated fast, and the complexity isn't the point. The point is simpler and doesn't change as your moral authority matures.
The point is our definition of what’s "right" depends entirely on which legitimising agent is doing the deciding.
And very few organisations that claim “doing the right thing” as one of their values, or organisations that seek to build trust with their customer have ever asked themselves which what level of ethical reasoning and what moral authority level are we operating from.
On a day when Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, called for a slowdown in the development of AI because it may do the wrong thing, Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman and Grok’s Elon Mush were both quick to support the idea.
But all of them are still missing the point. The problem isn’t AI its human beings. Or more precisely “bad actors” who may do terrible things with these super-powerful AI tools that Big Tech has built.
We saw the exact same problem with social media. Society is now seeking, far too late, to hold those companies accountable for the havoc they’ve wreaked on people’s mental health and livelihoods.
The real questions CEOs and organisations should be asking are:
So, the next time your leadership team nods along to the claim that they are "doing the right thing," don’t let it pass. Ask them a harder question: which level of moral reasoning are they actually operating from to make the decision of what is “right”?