Archive for the ‘values’ Category
Employment, Smokers, and Fundamental Ethical Conflicts
Filed under: employees, health, productivity, risk, values, workplace safety |
Comments (2) 
I’ve seen two interesting stories recently about smokers — of various kinds — facing trouble with their employers. Both stories raise difficult, perhaps intractable, ethical difficulties, because in both cases the objectives sought by employers are, on the face of things, entirely reasonable; and yet the freedoms sought by employees in these cases are also, I think, very reasonable ones to seek.
First, this piece by A.G. Sulzberger for the NY Times: Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans to Smoker Ban
…More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity, reduce health care costs and encourage healthier living….
I’ve blogged about this issue before. (See: “Smokers Need Not Apply”, from January of 2009.) My conclusion back then was that an employer, no matter how well-intentioned, has no right to tell employees what to do on their own time. They have a right to demand a certain level of performance on the job, and that might have implications for what employees do at home. But what employers have a right to is performance, rather than to a particular lifestyle in pursuit of that performance. Besides, there are lots (and lots and lots) of things employees can do at home that will limit their performance at work. I don’t see smoking as being unique among those, and letting employers screen for (and monitor?) all such behaviours would obviously constitute a massive invasion of privacy.
And then there’s this Reuters piece, reported by Clare Baldwin: Wal-Mart employee fired for medical pot loses case
A federal judge in Michigan on Friday upheld Wal-Mart Stores Inc’s dismissal of an employee for testing positive for marijuana, even though he was using the drug under the state’s medical marijuana law.
…
Former Wal-Mart employee Joseph Casias said he was using the marijuana to treat pain from an inoperable brain tumor and sinus cancer, and was doing so legally, with a medical marijuana registry card…
This one is trickier because the implications of marijuana — cannabis — for workplace performance are much clearer. Pot (even pot prescribed for very good reasons by a physician) is very likely to affect judgment. And the effects of smoking it can last 2-3 hours — so smoking just before work, or during a break, could reasonably be expected to have a negative impact on performance. But in the case above, the employee involved had what sound like very good reasons, if ever there were any. Wal-Mart is a company that is trying hard to polish its image, and firing people for trying to deal with the pain from their inoperable brain tumor seems inconsistent with that objective.
For me, this is one of those short news stories that immediately makes me wonder what’s really going on here. Is the employee one of “those” employees that a company looks for reasons to fire? Or was his manager an unsympathetic jerk? Or what? Because surely this is an issue that could have been sorted out among reasonable adults, without resorting to lawyers. Could the worker be moved to a position where the possible effects of at-home cannabis use would not be as problematic? Could the employee agree to limit the hours during which he would use cannabis, in return for an exemption from the company’s testing regimen? I don’t know the answer. But living and working together means that we find ways of getting along together, even when we cannot find ways of agreeing.
Authentically Unethical
Filed under: character, ethics, excuses, leadership, values, virtue |
Comments (1) Authenticity is the among the favourite buzzwords of the day. (My pal Andrew Potter’s recent book, The Authenticity Hoax, is a wonderful take-down of the concept.)
There are lots of ways the feel-good word, “authenticity”, can fail us. See, for a start, this blog entry by Deborah Gruenfeld and Lauren Zander, for the Harvard Business Review: Authentic Leadership Can Be Bad Leadership.
…being who you are and saying what you think can be highly problematic if the real you is a jerk. In practice, we’ve observed that placing value on being authentic has become an excuse for bad behavior among executives….
Gruenfeld and Zander’s basic point is that while authenticity (being who you really are) is great in principle, is authenticity the right goal if “who you really are” is a jerk? And in fact, there’s a fine line between being a jerk and being unethical. For starters, although most of us have our moments of rudeness, it is unethical — a serious character flaw — to consistently act like a jerk. Consistently acting rudely demonstrates a lack of respect for other people, and that’s unethical. So aiming for authenticity might not be all it’s cracked up to be, especially when compared to the more obvious aim of being a decent human being.
(See also Andrew’s Authenticity Hoax Blog.)
God-Washing Davos
Filed under: ethics, finance, greenwashing, international, sports, Uncategorized, values, workplace safety |
Comments (19) 
Can religion save the soul of the world’s economic system? What does religion have to do with ethics? In particular, what does religion have to do with business ethics? There’s certainly no necessary connection. You’ll notice an utter lack of theological arguments in this blog, for instance. But many people see a connection, and perhaps a necessary one.
For example, see this piece by Dan Gilgoff, for CNN’s “Belief” Blog: How Davos found God
…Since the banking crisis shook global markets more than two years ago and contributed to a worldwide economic slump, the annual Davos summit has invited dozens of religious and spiritual leaders to hash out issues like business ethics and the morality of markets in the company of presidents and corporate titans….
This worries me for two reasons.
First is that religious leaders have no particular expertise in the questions at hand. One clergyman quoted in the story says the key question is “how do you embed values in the culture of companies in a way that would change behaviors?” Good question, but it’s not one about which most religious leaders are likely to have any real insight. Most, for example, won’t know much about the workings of corporations, or about corporate culture, or about (for example) what the criminological literature says about the real causes of wrongdoing. Sure, talking about values can be a good thing. But there’s no good evidence that religious values, or organized religion as a way of inculcating values, does anything in particular to make people more ethical. And certainly there’s no reason to believe that “40 minutes of guided meditation” is going to play any role at all in fixing the problems faced by the world’s economy.
My second worry is that the inclusion of religious leaders is a distraction, a way of deflecting criticism by including a few dozen people who a large portion of the public are likely to associate with the idea of being a good person. It’s symbolic. It’s a way of signalling to the public that the business world really is concerned about doing the right thing — without engaging anyone who actually has the relevant expertise. It’s a feel-good move. It’s like greenwashing, but with religion rather than environmentalism as the focal distraction.
MTV’s “Skins”: The Ethics of Profiting from Teen Sexuality
Filed under: accountability, advertising, children, CSR, employees, ethics, marketing, media, sex, stakeholders, values |
Comments (5) There’s been a lot of chatter in the last few days about MTV’s teensploitation show, “Skins.” Of course, one theory says that that’s just what MTV has been hoping for — a lot of free advertizing.
I’m quoted giving a business-ethics perspective on the show in this story, by the NYT’s David Carr: “A Naked Calculation Gone Bad.”
What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.
And you’d be right.
Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of “Skins” was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.
Since I’m quoted in that story, I’ll just cut to my own conclusion:
“Even if you decide that this show is not out-and-out evil and that the show is legal from a technical perspective, that doesn’t really eliminate the significant social and ethical issues it raises,” said Chris MacDonald, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto’s Clarkson Center for Business Ethics and author of the Business Ethics Blog. “Teenagers are both sexual beings and highly impressionable, and because of that, they’re vulnerable to just these kinds of messages. You have to wonder if there isn’t a better way to make a living.”
I wouldn’t bet one way or the other on how this will turn out — in particular on whether pressure from advocacy groups and advertisers will convince MTV to can the show. If it does, then this controversy turns into a nice example of how just the wrong kind of corporate culture can produce bad results. Consider: there are an awful lot of people involved in conceiving and producing, and airing a TV drama. In order for Skins to make it to air, a lot of people had to spend months and months going with the flow, basically saying to themselves and each other “Yes, it is a really good idea to show teens this way, to use teen actors this way, and to market this kind of show to teens.” Hundreds of people involved in the production must have either thought it was a good idea, or thought otherwise but decided they couldn’t speak up. If this turns out badly, MTV will have provided yet another example of how things can go badly when employees aren’t encouraged and empowered to speak up and to voice dissent.
Sustainability is Unsustainable
Filed under: accountability, complexity, CSR, definitions, energy, environment, greenwashing, labelling, natural, sustainability, values |
Comments (21) I was tempted to call this blog entry “Sustainability is Stupid,” but I changed my mind because that’s needlessly inflammatory. And really, the problem isn’t that the concept itself is stupid, though certainly I’ve seen some stupid uses of the term. But the real problem is that it’s too broad for some purposes, too narrow for others, and just can’t bear the weight that many people want to put on it. The current focus on sustainability as summing up everything we want to know about doing the right thing in business is, for lack of a better word, unsustainable.
Anyway, I am tired of sustainability. And not just because, as Ad Age recently declared, it’s one of the most jargon-y words of the year. Which it is. But the problems go beyond that.
Here are just a few of the problems with sustainability:
1) Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, not everything unsustainable is bad. Oil is unsustainable, technically speaking. It will eventually get scarce, and eventually run out, for all intents and purposes. But it’s also a pretty nifty product. It works. It’s cheap. And it’s not going away soon. So producing it isn’t evil, and using it isn’t evil, even if (yes, yes) it would be better if we used less. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of oil. It would be great if cars could run on something more plentiful and less polluting, like sunshine or water or wind. But in the meantime, oil is an absolutely essential commodity. Unsustainable, but quite useful.
2) There are ways for things to be bad other than being unsustainable. Cigarettes are a stupid, bad product. They’re addictive. They kill people. But are they sustainable? You bet. The tobacco industry has been going strong for a few hundred years now. If that’s not sustainability, I don’t know what is. To say that the tobacco industry isn’t sustainable is like saying the dinosaur way of life wasn’t sustainable because dinosaurs only ruled the earth for, like, a mere 150 million years. So, it’s a highly sustainable industry, but a bad one.
3) There’s no such thing as “sustainable” fish or “sustainable” forests or “sustainable” widgets, if by “sustainable” you mean as opposed to the other, “totally unsustainable” kind of fish or forests or widgets. It’s not a binary concept, but it gets sold as one. A fishery (or a forest or whatever) is either more or less sustainable. So to label something “sustainable” is almost always greenwash. Feels nice, but meaningless.
4) We’re still wayyyy unclear on what the word “sustainable” means. And I’m not talking about fine academic distinctions, here. I’m talking big picture. As in, what is the topic of discussion? For some people, for example, “sustainability” is clearly an environmental concept. As in, can we sustain producing X at the current rate without running out of X or out of the raw materials we need to make X? Or can we continue producing Y like this, given the obvious and unacceptable environmental damage it does? For others, though — well, for others, “sustainability” is about something much broader: something economic, environmental, and social. This fundamental distinction reduces dramatically the chances of having a meaningful conversation about this topic.
5) Many broad uses of the term “sustainable” are based on highly questionable empirical hypotheses. For example, some people seem to think that “sustainable” isn’t just an environmental notion because, after all, how can your business be sustainable if you don’t treat your workers well? And how can you sustain your place in the market if you don’t produce a high-quality product? Etc., etc. But of course, there are lots of examples of companies treating employees and customers and communities badly, and doing so quite successfully, over time-scales that make any claim that such practices are “unsustainable” manifestly silly. (See #2 above re the tobacco industry for an example.)
6) We have very, very little idea what is actually sustainable, environmentally or otherwise. Sure, there are clear cases. But for plenty of cases, the correct response to a claim of sustainability is simply “How do you know?” We know a fair bit, I think, about what kinds of practices tend to be more, rather than less, environmentally sustainable. But given the complexities of ecosystems, and the complexities of production processes and business supply chains, tracing all the implications of a particular product or process in order to declare it “sustainable” is very, very challenging. I conjecture that there are far, far more claims of “sustainability” than there are instances where the speaker knows what he or she is talking about.
7) Sometimes, it’s right to do the unsustainable thing. For example, would you kill the last breeding pair of an endangered species (say, bluefin tuna, before long) to feed a starving village, if that was your only way of doing so? I would. Sure, there’s room for disagreement, but I think I could provide a pretty good argument that in such a case, the exigencies of the immediate situation would be more weighty, morally, than the long-term consequences. Now, hopefully such terrible choices are few. But the point is simply to illustrate that sustainability is not some sort of over-arching value, some kind of trump card that always wins the hand.
8 ) The biggest, baddest problem with sustainability is that, like “CSR” and “accountability” and other hip bits of jargon, it’s a little wee box that people are trying to stuff full of every feel-good idea they ever hoped to apply to the world of business. So let’s get this straight: there are lots and lots of ways in which business can act rightly, or wrongly. And not all of them can be expressed in terms of the single notion of “sustainability.”
Now, look. Of course I don’t have anything against sustainability per se. I like the idea of running fisheries in a way that is more, rather than less, sustainable. I like the idea of sustainable agriculture (i.e., agriculture that does less, rather than more, long-term damage to the environment and uses up fewer, rather than more, natural resources). But let’s not pretend that sustainability is the only thing that matters, or that it’s the only word we need in our vocabulary when we want to talk about doing the right thing in business.
Should Workplaces Ban Lotteries?
Filed under: employees, honesty, pay, pricing, profits, values |
Comments (10) Should workplaces ban lottery pools? Lots of offices feature “pools” of various kinds, with groups of employees joining together collaboratively or competitively to speculate on, e.g., the outcome of the NFL playoffs. Very likely lots of managers regard it all as harmless fun, boosting morale by giving employees a break from the tedium of their cubicle farms. But a lottery pool is unlike, say, a hockey or football pool. In a hockey or football pool, there are winners and losers, but typically the dollar amounts are pretty small. But when employees band together to buy lottery tickets, the possibility is there for all hell to break loose.
To see what I mean, take a look at this story, from the CBC: More claiming share of $50M lottery prize
Some of the claimants to the disputed $50-million Lotto Max jackpot were at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming prize centre on Wednesday being questioned about the win.
The original claimants — 19 Bell Canada call centre workers from east Toronto — validated the winning ticket on Monday, said OLG spokeswoman Sarah Kiriliuk.
But since then, several more people have come forward to say they should have a share of the prize, said Kiriliuk, although she refused to say exactly how many….
Clearly, this is an anxious moment for the winners. But it’s also surely a rather anxious moment for their employer, telecommunications giant Bell Canada.
My friend Andrew Potter (author of The Authenticity Hoax) suggested to me that there are at least a couple of reasons reasons why employers might legitimately choose to ban lottery pools.
The first reason Andrew suggests is the potential for a highly disruptive exodus of an entire group of employees in the event of a lottery win. Most people, when asked, say that the first thing they would do if they won the lottery is quit their jobs. Losing a good employee can be a bad thing. So what happens when a dozen or 20 employees win together, and very likely depart en mass? Clearly, employers have a significant interest in avoiding such an outcome. Of course, the odds against such a thing happening are, well, tiny…one in many millions. How tiny do they have to be for us to say that the employer would be out of line to try to prevent it?
Second, and I think more significantly, Andrew suggests that employers might have a strong interest in avoiding the possible legal troubles that could result from a group of employees winning a lottery. Even for a win much smaller than the $50 million win in the story above, there’s the chance that employees will come forward who say they were unfairly excluded for one reason or another. And with money on the line, lawsuits are far from unlikely. And when lawsuits happen, chances are that everyone is going to get sued, including the employer. After all, an excluded employee can reasonably claim that the employer was effectively hosting the lottery pool, and hence bears some responsibility for making sure that it is run fairly. Even if the dollar amounts are too small to result in lawsuits, I can imagine considerable disruption of the working environment when there’s disagreement over a lottery win. Just take the usual petty office grievances and multiply them by a few tens of thousands of dollars, and then a win for employees equals trouble for their employer.
Now, I’m not sure there’s a huge risk here, but I think it’s an interesting question. Obviously, it behooves employers to allow employees a little breathing room when it comes to lunch-break entertainment. In general, it’s good for employers to respect employees’ privacy and autonomy, and that might include the freedom to engage in things like office pools. For most of us, our employers already dominate our lives in ways that are at least sometimes regrettable, so employers should be cautious about imposing unnecessary constraints. But given that lotteries are already widely-criticized as a regressive form of taxation (or, more bluntly, as a ‘tax on the inability to do math’), it might well be that eliminating office lottery pools would be a reasonable move.
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Addendum: it’s a little-known and sad fact that a relatively high proportion of lottery winners eventually file for bankruptcy. [URL updated Aug. 2011]
Ethics and Stupidity
Filed under: complexity, corporations, decision-making, employees, ethics, excuses, values, virtue |
Comments (9) 
Why do people do bad things? It’s an ancient question. Certainly, some people do bad things simply because they are bad people. Psychopaths and sociopaths exist, though thankfully they are very few. Whether those few should be classified as “evil,” or as “mentally ill,” or both, is not clear to me. Either way, they certainly have the capacity to do evil. But sometimes, surely — maybe quite often — people do bad things stupidly, rather than out of evil intent. Sometimes, as I’ve blogged before, people do bad things because they allow themselves to use invalid excuses. It’s likely that some people know (in their heart of hearts) that they’re using lame excuses. But probably some people sincerely believe those excuses, and simply don’t understand that their reasoning is flawed.
“Hanlon’s Razor” is the name for an adage attributed to one Robert J. Hanlon. It says the following:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
It’s a good rule of thumb, not least because it is so often true that bad outcomes owe more to poor decision-making than they do to evil intent.
Of course, if what we’re really interested in is why bad things happen, attributing it to stupidity rather than malice just pushes the question down one level. If so many people act stupidly, why?
There are at least 3 kinds of situations in which dumb things happen:
- Some dumb moves are made by people who, well, are not that bright. The truth is that people have different levels of ability. We don’t all have equally-good judgment, and we’re not all equally good at foreseeing the consequences of our actions. In a corporate context, good hiring practices are supposed to weed out the untalented. But talent pools are always limited. And remember: screwups can in principle occur anywhere within a corporate hierarchy, so there’s no position so unimportant that a company can simply afford to fill it poorly.
- Some dumb moves are made by people — maybe even smart people — who lack the relevant skills. In some cases, that may mean they lack the relevant technical skills. If you’re not an accountant, for example, you simply may not understand the consequences of certain kinds of bookkeeping decisions. But people can also lack the skills to assess, for example, the quality of their own arguments and thought processes. I teach a course on Critical Thinking, and believe me, people are not all equally good at spotting fallacious arguments or flawed patterns of thought. But it’s a skill-set that can be taught, and learned.
- Some “dumb” decisions get made as a result of one or another of a bunch of well-studied cognitive biases. Those biases — the subject of an enormous body of psychological literature — go by names like “anchoring,” and “confirmation bias” and “the framing effect,”. (Confirmation bias, for example, essentially means that we have a tendency to accept new evidence when it confirms what we already believe, and to reject new data that challenges our beliefs. It’s dangerous, and we all do it.) Basically, cognitive biases are a bunch of persistent, and generally faulty, trends in the way humans think. They are ways in which we are pretty consistently subject to patterns of error in our thinking. Alarmingly, these cognitive biases tend to apply to smart people, too, as well as to people with the kind of technical training that you might hope would help them avoid such biases.
(For a bit more on why individuals do dumb things, see this Wired piece on Why Do Smart People Do Stupid Things?)
So, there are lots of reasons why people — even smart people — end up doing dumb things. And sometimes those dumb things will have evil (or just bad) consequences. It’s worth understanding the difference between bad things that happen because someone did something bad, and bad things that happen because someone did something dumb, though in some cases the line will be pretty fuzzy.
And I suspect Hanlon’s Razor holds true of organizations just as it does for individuals, and maybe more so. So really, we need to distinguish between why individuals act stupidly, and why organizations do. That’s a topic for another day.
WikiLeaks and NGO Legitimacy
Filed under: accountability, activism, NGO, stakeholders, values |
Comments (12) The ethical standards that apply to an organization depend in part on what kind of organization it is. Some standards are either universal or nearly so: lying, cheating, stealing are generally bad whoever you are. But lots of other rules, principles, and values will vary, at least in terms of the weight attached to them. It matters for lots of purposes whether you are a corporation, a government agency, a non-governmental organization (NGO), a social club, a church, or a newspaper.
What kind of organization is WikiLeaks? It is sometimes referred to as a news agency, though that designation is disputed. Let’s look at WikiLeaks as a straightforward cause-oriented NGO, for the sake of argument.
One key question we ought to ask with regard to any NGO has to do with its legitimacy. In other words, for any NGO, we need to ask, “does this group have the right to speak and act on behalf of the cause it claims to speak and act for?” In other words, anyone may claim (for example) to “represent the forces of Good” or to “stand for justice” or to “speak for the whales.” And anyone is free to say what they want in defence of goodness or justice or whales. But saying you speak for goodness or justice or whales doesn’t mean that you actually do, and it doesn’t mean that anyone should listen to you or consult you on important decisions. Being a legitimate spokesperson takes something else. But what?
One framework that I’ve found useful is the one provided by Iain Atack in his paper “Four Criteria of Development NGO Legitimacy.”1. Atack’s framework is intended to apply to development NGOs, but I think that the basic idea can be applied more broadly.
Atack suggests that an NGO may gain legitimacy from one or more of 4 sources:
- Representativeness (Does the organization, for example, have a large membership base for which it genuinely speaks?)
- Effectiveness (Does the organization have a proven track record of getting the job done?)
- Empowerment (Does the organization work not just to achieve its goals, but to make sure that those it helps are, in the long run, left better-able to achieve those goals themselves?)
- Values (Does the organization embody and promote the values that are essential to the sort of organization it is, whatever those may be?)
Each of these is a way in which an NGO might acquire legitimacy. Some NGOs might score well on several of those. Some on just one. Some on none — and those that score well on none of those criteria are, according to Atack’s framework, lacking in legitimacy. Stated negatively, we could put the point this way: if an organization doesn’t have a membership base, isn’t effective, doesn’t work to empower those it seeks to help, and doesn’t embody the relevant values, then just what makes it think it has the right to speak or act for anyone other than itself?
Of course, these are not all-or-nothing questions. An organization can be representative, effective, etc., to a greater or lesser degree, and hence be either more or less legitimate.
This framework isn’t the be-all and end-all of assessing NGO legitimacy, but it’s a starting point. So, consider an NGO like WikiLeaks. Where does its legitimacy come from? In other words, what is the source of whatever moral authority is has? Is it from one of the sources Atack suggests, or is it something else?
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1Ian Atack, “Four Criteria of Development NGO Legitimacy,” World Development, 27:5 (1999) 855-864.
Wikileaks & Mastercard: Should Companies Do Government’s Bidding?
Filed under: accountability, corporate citizenship, corporations, CSR, environment, government, law, politics, values |
Comments (4) 
The controversy over Wikileaks has raised the question of whether companies should do government’s bidding. One popular suspicion is that Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal stopped acting as conduits for donations to Wikileaks not on principled grounds, but rather due to government pressure. If that’s true, is it ethically acceptable for business to act that way, as a tool of government? I’m not talking about government contractors, including military contractors like Blackwater, though I suppose the comparison is not entirely ridiculous. I’m thinking broadly of companies (ones not in the employ of government) helping to enact public policy or to implement the will of government more generally.
From a moral point of view, the question has to hinge in part on the moral quality of the particular thing business is being asked to do, and that may in turn hinge in part on the moral character of the particular government involved. Think, for example, of the controversy over Google participating in censorship in China. Many people thought it was wrong for Google to implement government policy in that case because they believe the Chinese government’s censoring of its citizens’ internet access to be morally problematic.
It’s worth pointing out that there are times and places where participating in implementing government objectives has been seen as unobjectionable, even patriotic. During both World Wars, companies were expected to participate in the ‘war effort’ by ramping up production, by shifting production to products needed for the war, and by conserving key raw materials. And that sort of active, corporate civic responsibility isn’t limited to times of war. Note that the US Department of Homeland Security expanded its “If You See Something, Say Something” to…
…hundreds of Walmart stores across the country – launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation.
I think it’s also instructive here to consider the relationship between “the state” (roughly, the government) and society. Many people are happy to think of corporations as instruments of society — that’s what motivates much of the CSR movement. We think it right for businesses to be environmentally responsible because we, as a society, value the environment. We want to conserve our resources, and we expect business to do its part. But the democratic state, like it or not, is a legitimate instrument of society. Now, government (including democratic government) is notoriously imperfect. As Churchill said, democracy is the worst system in the world, except for all the rest. But it’s hard to see how you can approve of (or insist upon) corporate implementation of social objectives and at the same time object entirely to corporate implementation of government objectives when those objectives are the reasonable objectives of a relatively-legitimate government.
In the end, it seems to me that if the behaviour in question is not intrinsically unethical (as Microsoft and Yahoo helping China’s government spy on dissidents arguably was) and if the behaviour doesn’t violate the firm’s fiduciary obligations to its shareholders, then it is at least permissible (though not necessarily obligatory) for a business to help implement public policy.
What do “Higher Standards” for Business Look Like?
Filed under: accountability, definitions, ethics, standards, values, white collar crime |
Leave a comment When we see what seems to be an increase in misbehaviour, we need to ask: is that because behaviour has gotten worse, or because expectations have gotten higher?
See this piece, by Theresa Tedesco, for Financial Post Magazine: Farther. Faster. Higher.
…Business leaders are on trial like never before. Public outrage over recent ethical crises and the dramatic failures of corporate governance, most notably the stunning collapse of Enron Corp. and the financial crisis of 2008, have fuelled assumptions that government and regulators are stepping in and that ethical standards of business must be on the rise as a result. Certainly, public awareness is heightened in the aftermath of spectacular corporate collapses. But are ethical standards actually getting higher as a result? Or are shareholders, employees and other stakeholders simply more aware of the moral considerations in the wake of these scandals and crises, considerations that are soon to be forgotten? Either way, the role of the modern CEO and other senior executives has become much more complex, driven almost reflexively by the velocity of change in social values, technology, regulation and, increasingly, public opinion….
(I’m also quoted, making a point I’ve made before, namely that business is more ethical today than it has ever been in the past.)
But there’s also an interesting philosophical question, here, about what counts as a “higher” standard.
In some cases, “higher standards” might actually mean that we attribute to business obligations in domains in which they previously were seen as having basically no obligations at all. Environmental concern might be one such domain. Once upon a time, pollution just wasn’t an issue. At even once pollution was “on the radar,” so to speak, specific types of pollution (e.g., CFC’s) still weren’t seen as important. In that sense, it’s clearly true that we see “higher standards” imposed, and observed, by business today.
A second kind of “higher standards” might involve stricter requirements for things like honesty and product safety and truth in advertising. Once upon a time, the rule really was “buyer beware.” That’s no longer the case. Social expectations, often backed by law, mean that businesses face (and generally adhere to) standards far higher than we’ve ever seen before in history.
A third kind of “higher standard” might have to do with social expectations with regard to the impact business has beyond its interactions with its own customers and employees. Now, it has long been the case that many businesses make social contributions through things like charitable donations. But today, it is utterly run-of-the-mill for companies to have CSR departments that consider not just things like charitable donations, but how to track and report on the business’s net social impact. This is yet another way in which businesses face, and face up to, higher expectations.
But there is also a fourth kind of higher standard, one which is less-obviously being met. And that is in the area of individual decision-making. When the average person (or the ethicist, for that matter) surveys the world of business, he or she still sees examples of bad behaviour — people lying, cheating, embezzling, and defrauding. Most of us get our data in that regard from the media, which is far from a fair accounting of the issue. But still, the cases are out there. And it’s in that sense that people are very fair to observe that, at very least, things don’t seem to be getting better, dammit. Then again, I know of no credible evidence that things are getting any worse in this regard.
I suspect different people mean different things when they talk about whether “ethical standards” are higher or lower in business today. I suspect that the first 3 kinds of “higher standards” above are the crucial ones, since I suspect that the 4th, which depends on the character of individual human beings, is less susceptible to long-term change on a population basis.
The Business Ethics Blog 