Is there such a thing as Business ethics or only personal ...

July 27th, 2011 ? No Comments

Chris McDonald, known as @ethicsblogger, has responded to an assertion by Seth Godin, the marketing guru. I?m responding to and building on both here.

Following is Chris?s post verbatim.

Marketing guru (blogger, author, etc.) Seth Godin posted a provocative blog entry called, ?No such thing as business ethics?, in which he worries that the focus on ?business ethics and corporate social responsibility? is distracting us from questions of personal responsibility:

It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in, doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially?.

Now I could quibble with Godin?s definition of ethics, which is actually a particular controversial view about what ethics requires, rather than a definition. But instead I?m going to take issue with Godin?s claim that all that matters in business is personal ethics, rather than organizational ethics. Godin writes:

I worry that we absolve ourselves of responsibility when we talk about business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Corporations are collections of people, and we ought to insist that those people (that would be us) do the right thing. Business is too powerful for us to leave our humanity at the door of the office. It?s not business, it?s personal.

Godin?s claim that ?it?s not business, it?s personal? is problematic in two ways. First, it wrongly implies that business ethics somehow misses out on the whole personal integrity thing. That?s entirely false. Both the academic literature on business ethics and the ?ethics and values? programs set up by individual companies put a lot of emphasis on individuals adopting the right values and making good decisions. Secondly, contrary to what Godin implies, individual ethics clearly is not enough. For one thing, people embedded in organizations have obligations that are role-specific. Just as lawyers and doctors have special duties that go along with their roles ? they have to follow not just their own consciences, but also highly specific professional codes ? so do people in the world of business. And for another thing, organizations can be set up badly such that all kinds of ?good? individual decisions can still lead to problematic outcomes. The ethics of the organization, per se, matters a lot.

Interestingly, Godin tells us that he learned about all this from his dad. Unfortunately, while the homely lessons we learned at our parents? knees tend to give us a good start in life, complex institutional settings tend to bring more complex duties, and hence require more complex principles.

And here is my response to Chris:

Boy, do I agree with you. Especially since the Supreme Court made corporations persons. I suggest that both individuals and businesses rely on explicit statements of beliefs and principles about what is ?right? in order not to miss it when it shows up. For corporations and organizations I call them Social and Planetary Imperatives. These are statements the organization commits to as a whole. Everyone involved must discuss and draw conclusions about what makes everything they affect healthy and vital. It?s not possible to be ethical in the abstract. Ethics are all about enabling living entities to be whole and evolving.

The same is true for individuals. We have no system through which people learn how life works, whether human or biota. So we cannot know what is right simply by learning it from someone else. We have to participate intentionally in the formation of our ethics over our whole lives.

What Godin is right about it that CSR programs distract us from ethical behavior. In far too many instances it is their programmatic nature, for individuals and the business as a whole, which is based not on creating health but only on doing less harm. They leave out questions of human trafficking and healthy and vital communities.

The same is true at the individual level. Teachers no longer have time, authority, or even skill in many cases, for growing healthy beings (critical thinking skills, personal development) and so they just try to get them through the system (pass the standardized tests). Bard College is proving that developing whole beings, even ones who have been incarcerated for many years, is far more successful than training them in job skills. Our schools and businesses fail people by not developing them as whole, healthy, unique individuals.

Most of the programs for CSR just adopt the methods of the classroom and compound the problem. The system is broken at both levels, individual and organization. Even so, it?s not the trade-off of one for the other, individual or organization, but the lack of capability and systems thinking in both cases. Fragmented approaches and working from ?do less harm? are the real distractions.

Source: http://www.carolsanford.com/blog/?p=838

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