A Global Ethics Day post for October 21, 2026
On October 21, organizations around the world will mark Global Ethics Day. This year’s theme is Recentering Ethics, and it arrives at the right moment. In boardrooms and break rooms alike, ethics keeps getting pushed to the margin, treated as a compliance exercise to complete rather than the center of how decisions get made. Recentering is not a slogan. It is a choice about what comes first. The Carnegie Council, which organizes the day, puts it plainly: ethics is an active process each of us can engage in, not an abstract subject for philosophers.
Start with what you can actually control. In The only thing you control are your ethical choices, I drew on Stoicism to make a simple point: leaders cannot control outcomes, markets, or other people. The one thing fully within their control is the ethical quality of their own choices. When ethics sits at the center, that control becomes a daily practice instead of a crisis response. That is what a recentered ethics looks like up close: not a program, a person choosing well.
Honest practice means admitting that real dilemmas rarely look like the training slides. Choosing between two “rights” argued that ethics training should stop pretending every situation is right versus wrong. Sometimes two competing rights collide, and employees need preparation for that discomfort, not another cartoon villain. An ethics that is recentered has to be honest about hard cases.
It also has to be real. The newspaper test, the idea that you should act as if your choices will appear in tomorrow’s paper, only works if people believe it. In Making the newspaper test real, I suggested companies share anonymized cases of employees terminated for wrongdoing. Real examples teach more than abstract principles. Ethics at the center means talking about what actually happened, not what might happen in theory.
Finally, recentering needs language people can use. Good faith explored a phrase worth embedding in policy: acting in good faith, meaning conduct that filters out dishonesty and bad intent. It is short enough to remember and concrete enough to test a decision against. A centered ethics is one employees can carry into a meeting without a manual. When the standard is good faith, the question in the room gets simpler: would an honest person stand behind this?
So on October 21, do not just celebrate ethics. Recenter it. Put it back where it belongs, at the center of the next decision you make.
Ethics was never meant to be the margin. Put it back in the middle.
