The Business Ethics Blog

It looks like Walmart has won a small but significant legal victory in its campaign to keep its employees un-unionized.

From the Edmonton Journal: Supreme Court buys Wal-Mart stance on store closure

The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the right of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, to close shop after employees unionized at an outlet in Jonquiere, Que.

In a 6-3 decision, Justice Ian Binnie, citing previous case law, noted there is no legislation in Quebec that obliges any employer to remain in business, even if it closes for “socially reprehensible” reasons.

The store closure, which followed one of the first unionizations of Wal-Mart employees in North America, drew continent-wide attention and the high-stakes appeal has been closely watched by labour and business….

I’ve blogged about Walmart’s anti-union stance before (here and here).

A couple of things are worth noting, in light of this ruling. First, note that the SCC said that Walmart is allowed (legally) to close stores, even when it does so for “socially reprehensible” reasons. That’s a good reminder that there is a difference between what’s ethical and what’s legal. There’s plenty of overlap between the two, but there is also (and has to be) some divergence. The Supreme Court’s job is strictly to rule on the legality of Walmart’s behaviour. But at the same time, it’s interesting to see the highest court in the land referring to Walmart’s actions in a way that at least implies disdain.

Another point, one I’ve made before, is that it’s important, ethically, to distinguish between having an anti-union stance, on one hand, and engaging in particular anti-union activities, on the other. There’s nothing outrageous about a company being anti-union, especially a company whose entire business model is rooted in providing low-cost goods to (mostly) low-income consumers. After all, unions (understandably) want to drive up wages, and higher wages means higher prices. So while there certainly are particular union-busting practices that are unethical (and closing a store may or may not be one of them), there’s nothing unethical about trying to keep unions out.

One final point. Unions generally have 2 main goals…to drive up wages, and to secure for members suitable working conditions. Any company that manages to keep its employees happy with regard to non-wage issues is much less likely, it seems to me, to have to fight battles over unionization.
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Here’s the story as reported by the Globe & Mail: Court rules against Wal-Mart workers
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Clarification:
The bit about “socially reprehensible reasons” was actually the current court quoting an earlier judgment from the SCC, in a case called Place des Arts. (Thanks Jim).
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Correction: Here’s the corrected link to the SCC’s decision: Plourde v. Wal‑Mart Canada Corp. 2009 SCC 54

This past Friday I gave a talk on ethics & food at the University of Western Ontario. (The event was sponsored by the Rotman Institute of Science and Values and the Philosophy Department.)

The talk was essentially an exploration of a cluster of issues related to the large (and growing) number of value dimensions along which consumers currently evaluate food products. People want food that is tasty and nutritious, but at least some of them also want food that is organic, cruelty-free, non-GMO, fairly traded, low-carbon, local, shade-grown, hand-harvested, dolphin-friendly, and so on.

Many of those characteristics are associated with the term “ethical food.” But of course no one characteristic is likely to be sufficient to warrant calling a particular food product “ethical.” And if we want to evaluate which of two food products is more ethical, we quickly find that it’s very hard (indeed, impossible) simply to “sum up” the ethical qualities of any given food product to arrive at some sort of “bottom line” for purposes of comparison. Another problem is that some of the values we might care about can come into direct conflict. If you want your salmon to be wild (as opposed to farmed) that’s fine, unless you also want it organic. If it’s wild, its diet can’t be controlled, and hence it can’t be organic. You have to choose one of those things or the other. Consider also the conflict between wanting your food locally grown, on one hand, and wanting it grown in an ecologically sensitive manner: you can’t have it both ways if, for example, you live in a place not naturally suited to growing produce (e.g., Arizona).

The other thing I talked about was the role that brands play in consumer food choices. Branding is most typically thought of as a means of product differentiation, and as a mechanism for fostering trust. But brands can also be thought of as clusters of values. Different brands mean different things to consumers, and consumers may become devoted to a particular food brand because the values they see that brand as representing fit well with their own values. This means that brands can be an important mechanism for simplifying the choices consumers face, and helping consumers buy just what it is that they really want most — i.e., food products that embody their preferred cluster of values. Finally, it means that brands are likely to be expected to bear a lot of weight — weight they may or may not be capable of bearing. It also means that brands, taken as a means of communication between producer and consumer, represent an important opportunity for either ethical or unethical communication.

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p.s. thanks again to the faculty and students at UWO for their kind invitation and for being such a great audience!

It’s a common refrain. Don’t blame the business schools for all the bad stuff happening on Wall Street. It’s not the b-schools’ fault, because after all, ethics can’t be taught. The first bit there is reasonable enough: the recent financial crisis is the result of a complicated convergence of factors, apparently including bad decisions by quite a number of individuals, and some poorly-structured institutions. But the latter part, implying the futility of ethics instruction at business schools, is simply wrong-headed.

For the latest iteration of this mistaken view, check out this opinion piece by Clifford Orwin, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, in the Globe and Mail: Can we teach ethics? When pigs fly

Ethics is a serious business. And that’s why, reading in last weekend’s Globe and Mail about the gurgling wave of ethics education sweeping North American business schools, I had to laugh.

“MBA programs around the globe,” wrote Joanna Pachner, “are rushing to prove that they teach students to be good – not just rich – by revamping their curriculums and encouraging debates about ethical corporate behaviour.”

I blogged about the MBA ethics oaths here. But Orwin’s real focus is on business school curriculum:

I’m not suggesting that business students are bad people, or that those who would teach them to be good are any less competent than the rest of us. It’s just that the whole notion of teaching ethical behaviour rests on a fundamental misconception – namely, that ethical behaviour can be taught.

But Orwin’s criticism is off-target, for two reasons.

The first problem is that Orwin neglects that the main goal of business education is to teach people management skills. So we can usefully teach people to devise management structures that minimize wrong-doing on the part of their employees, even if we can’t change the characters of future managers themselves.

The second problem: people like Orwin wrongly assume that the key to better behaviour is modifying character. But that flies in the face of our best understanding (as represented in the criminology literature) of the psychology of wrongdoing. The key to wrongdoing is not primarily that wrongdoers have the wrong values (from which it would follow that ethics classes need to accomplish the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of instilling the right values in just a few short months of instruction). The key to wrongdoing is much more likely to involve faulty ways of thinking about certain behaviours, namely thinking about them in ways that “neutralize” them, morally, effectively exempting the wrongdoer from moral blame. (A simple example is the redescription of theft as “borrowing”, or the redescription of stealing from one’s employer as “merely taking what I deserve”). The arguments behind such neutralizations are generally fallacious, and fallacies of reasoning are something that can be taught, either in an ethics class or indeed in a first-year Critical Thinking class.

Thus it’s not that Orwin is wrong in claiming that virtue cannot be taught. It’s that he’s wrong in thinking that that’s a decisive argument against ethics education.

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My take on the moral psychology of wrongdoing, and the conclusion it implies about ethics education, is adopted entirely from Joseph Heath’s wonderful paper, “Business Ethics and Moral Motivation: A Criminological Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 83:4, 2008. Here’s the abstract.