Some people might argue an amoral stance, leadership being the practice of getting people to help you with your goals, no matter what they are. At first blush that might seem reasonable, but the argument quickly falls apart.

Something Higher

This goes back to the basic idea of leadership. You try to mobilize people to jointly achieve something greater than yourself. That means there are fundamental principles you must value beyond your own self-interest. If you don't have them, then all your efforts eventually come down to you. Even if you are a celebrity, you'll find it difficult to keep people focused on your needs and wants; they have their own to tend to. It's only with a joint focus on some principle everyone feels is important that a team can harness its energies and achieve something. Starting from yourself requires you to be extraordinarily good at deceiving people or else your efforts will quickly end. Either case is a waste of the limited time you have.

Furthermore, acting in conflict with principles you believe in forces you to find some way to reconcile your actions. If you are like the vast majority of people in the world, you cannot comfortably live with a clash between principle and action. If you don't rectify the situation, you are stuck creating rationalizations and internal lies to maintain a façade of consistency. Involve a group of people, and the deception takes a lot of collective energy. Develop the reputation for acting unethically, and you might find it hard to get cooperation from others.

Some might argue that real perversions of the group goal concept have still been perceived by participants as goals greater than themselves. Talk to a white supremacist, for example, and you'll hear rationalization of how they fight for a principle. However, they don't. Their real motivations include fear and deep-seated insecurity. Any talk about some higher purpose is really self-delusion and rationalization to avoid facing any remnants of conscience they might have.

Means and Ends

Someone who agrees that a greater principle is necessary could still argue that the issue wasn't about the motive force but the method used to attain the higher goal. That becomes an argument for the ends justifying the means.

The minute you operate by means that are incompatible with the principles you seek, you undermine those principles. The very action of trying to attain your goal with an incompatible approach damages it. It might look as though you still got what you wanted. But if you objectively examined what happened, you'd find that in some essential way, the results weren't what you had first envisioned. This is the process by which a group of people can insist that they want basic freedom but in reality deny it to other people.

Taking a Stand

In the famous tome How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren argued that when you read a practical volume, if you find yourself agreeing with an author's line of reasoning, then you have the obligation under intellectual honesty to undertake the advice from the author. To ignore the advice is to say that while you thought the writer had an interesting argument, you didn't find it compelling enough to change your mind and, through that, your actions.

Such logic applies to ethics and leadership. If you have convinced yourself of the need to support a set of principles and goals, to take action that would run counter to them should be unacceptable. So take a stand and don't be satisfied with activity that falls short. To maintain your devotion to your principles and to keep your action in accordance with them, you need to learn something about ethics and related concepts and then understand some practical considerations and techniques.