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VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
ing over centuries, of attempting to resolve disputes amicably, and CAB’s
Rules for Mediation and Conciliation Proceedings1 refer to its process as
being “in conformity with the Islamic concepts of unity, brotherhood, justice,
compassion, equity, tolerance and goodwill”.2 CAB’s services are quick,
confidential and generally free. They can be accessed by any Ismaili (even
when the other disputant is not an Ismaili) and are provided by professionally
trained mediators who handle commercial, matrimonial and other family
related disputes. Cases are confidentially audited for follow-up and
evaluated for dispute prevention and to improve mediation processes. CAB
operates within a community network of sister institutions (including, for
example, economic planners, social workers and educators) to whom CAB
“plays back” its root cause analyses so that corrective measures (such as
prudent planning or proper business documentation) can be taken to prevent
future disputes.
CAB is probably the only ADR institution in the world for whom ethical
mediation is a central feature. The impetus for this was the Aga Khan’s
insistence on ethical literacy, on educating people “who can reason morally
whenever they analyze and resolve problems, who see the world through
the lens of ethics, and who can articulate their moral reasoning clearly”.3
In 2015, the author assumed the task of developing an Ethics Training Module
(“ETM”) for CAB to encourage ethical literacy among its mediators and
to promote ethical mediations. This article, based on a recent training session
for CAB trainees worldwide, sets out certain key features of the ETM.
ETHICAL MEDIATION
The terms “ethics” and “morals” are used interchangeably, but there is a significant
distinction between them that is important for our purposes: ethics,
unlike morals, implies an ethos, a way of seeing how values relate to the
universal principles from which they derive. There are, of course, many
theories of ethics (e.g., virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism), and
one cannot always know or predict the ethical influences of mediators or
disputants. They will come from diverse cultural and ethical backgrounds.
Therefore, one must seek to appeal to universal ethical principles, transcending
ideological divisions. Within CAB, as elsewhere, the appeal is to
principles rooted in our underlying human interconnectedness. This
enables a mediation to be founded on certain basic ethical ideas rooted in
the respect for our common humanity.4
The ETM delineates nine basic ethical ideas, in groupings of three:
1. Harmony