Two guys named Rush were in the news last week. Unfortunately, almost all the attention went to the wrong one.

Sure, Rush Limbaugh, America’s self-appointed instigator, touched off one of his signature firestorms when he labeled Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” simply for suggesting to Congress that all women deserve access to contraceptives.

But even as the airwaves crackled with the fallout from that fiasco, I found myself fixated on the other Rush – the one who used his considerable communication skills not to roil the currents of modern-day culture, but rather to calm them.

Rushworth Kidder, founder and president of the Institute for Global Ethics in Rockport, died last week of natural causes at the age of 67. It is a loss, both for Maine and the world at large, that should not go unnoticed.

“Sometimes the word ‘visionary’ is overdone,” noted Paul McAuliffe, chairman of the institute’s board of directors, in an interview Friday. “But I think it really applied to Rush.”

Kidder was a longtime journalist with the Christian Science Monitor – and a very good one at that – before he decided he could only do so much with the “ethics beat” he’d developed through the 1980s.

And so in 1990, he left the newspaper business to found the Institute for Global Ethics on the rocky coast of Maine.

Always genial, always curious and, most noticeably, never judgmental, Kidder spent the last third of his life hunched over those daily ethical dilemmas most of us bend over backward to avoid.

“We sort of work on a triage principle around here,” he told me with a smile during a memorable interview at the institute just over a year ago. “There’s probably a third of your audience who couldn’t care less (about ethics) and is never going to get it. Then there’s a third of your audience that’s already on board and they know all this stuff and they love it.”

Long pause.

“Our target audience is that middle third,” he finally said. “If we can move the needle on the dial from 33 percent to 66 percent – in terms of people who really care about ethics – we’ve done an enormous amount.”

Kidder, who grew the institute from himself and a part-time assistant working out of a second-floor walk-up in Camden to a worldwide network with offices in New York City and London, never wavered in his belief that “ethics” means far more than simply discerning what’s right from what’s wrong.

“What we’re needing is the recognition that in a mature democracy, we don’t spend more than five seconds debating right-versus-wrong questions,” he said. “Every question that comes before us as a matter of policy is a right-versus-right question. Or it wouldn’t be there.”

Always the illustrator, he posed this hypothetical right-versus-wrong choice: Do we put Grandma in a nursing home? Or do we put her on an iceberg and float her out to sea to die?

The latter option, Kidder noted, “is so clearly wrong we don’t pay attention to it.”

Ah, but now let’s redefine the dilemma: Do we keep Grandma in her home and provide her the medical assistance and other services she needs to retain her treasured independence?

Or do we coax her and countless others like her into facilities where those services can be delivered with more efficiency and less cost?

“Now that’s a powerful right-versus-right debate,” Kidder observed. “And that will occupy a lot of effort and time.”

His knack for hitching the philosophical to the everyday – the parent who fibs to get her small-for-his-age 13-year-old into the movie theater on a 12-and-under ticket, the income-tax filer who pads a deduction because “everybody does it” and the chances of being caught are next-to-nil – is what made Kidder so much more approachable than your typical ivory-tower ethicist.

It’s also what made his 12 books – the last, published in 2010, was titled “Good Kids, Tough Choices: How Parents Can Help Their Children Do the Right Thing” – so useful to parents, educators, corporate executives and countless others in search of a reliable moral compass.

Board Chairman McAuliffe, who was chief ethics officer at the medical technology company Becton, Dickinson & Co. when he first met Kidder 15 years ago and now serves as executive director of the Federal Reserve Employee Benefits System, said Kidder’s “clarity of vision” often “left me feeling kind of silly that I hadn’t thought of something myself.”

“Many trained ethicists are very professorial and have a hard time translating that great thought they just had into something actionable,” McAuliffe said. “Rush had that ability.”

Hence Kidder’s frequent references to “moral courage” – those moments we all experience when knowing what we should do isn’t enough: We actually have to pay for that higher-priced movie ticket. We owe it to ourselves to file an honest tax return.

More recently, Kidder found himself venturing beyond individual ethics into what he called a “culture of integrity.” He saw it as a place where the community – by virtue of its individual parts – transforms from an arena where anything goes into a conduit for the collective good.

“We’re finally concluding that ethics is not an option,” Kidder said. “It’s not an add-on. It’s not something you can do as you wish. It’s not negotiable. It’s absolutely essential to our survival.”

Which brings us back to that other Rush.

Limbaugh didn’t come up by name the day I sat down with Kidder in late 2010. Still, I could feel the shock-talk host’s presence as Kidder lamented “what passes for public discourse these days.”

With all due respect to what the Institute for Global Ethics is trying to achieve, I asked, aren’t we still mired in an extremely polarized society?

“It is polarized,” Kidder conceded. “But in fact, what’s happening as a result of that is the beginning of a very interesting pushback. You’re seeing a disgust arising with the ‘outrage’ of the polarizers.”

Outrage over the “outrage?”

“Exactly,” he said. “People are beginning to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not how you behave. This is not a civil society.’ ”

We’ll never know exactly what Rush Kidder thought about the latest flap over Rush Limbaugh. By the time last week’s national debate progressed to Limbaugh’s market-driven apology, Kidder was gone.

But I do know this.

One Rush, when his obituary is finally written, will be known as the guy who used his booming, baritone voice to divide us in every way he possibly could.

The other Rush, a quieter man with so much more to say, only brought us together.

Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:

bnemitz@mainetoday.com