>The answer is there are no business ethics.
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As is often the case, I agree with Chuck. But in a long winded way.
In the early eighties, I got my first corporate job, a hi-tech startup in Sillicon Valley. There was an absolute river of (speculative) money running through the valley then, and it seemed like all you had to do is to stand there and scoop it up. It was all about a new and revolutionary kind of enterprise, one in which millions, billions could be created out of thin air, out of an idea, out of an attitude. I don't know whether greed always has to tell itself a pretty story, or whether the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings that were creating this world had caught a strong whiff of flower power, but psychobabble ruled. Every fledgling company swore that it wasn't in business to make money. Oh, NO! We were in business to create "value" --we were in business to champion a certain culture, a certain set of values, values that would revolutionize some industry or other. It didn't seem to matter which. When you talked "values" and "culture" and "revolution", it seemed clear that those kinds of changes would be about explosive growth; about real economic alchemy. Before it went bust, my startup burned through 30 million dollars in two years. It employed about a hundred people. We could have accomplished about as much had we spent all that time just tearing up dollar bills. Or doing coke. ....ahem.
All this was surreal and amusing by turns. I'll never forget the initial period of intense fantasy during which the managerial layer took up the task of creating a "corporate culture." We were all asked to write up statements and proposals about what we thought corporate culture was and what specific values we thought our corporation should stand for. Everybody in marketing and sales just ate this stuff up; but the technical people were impatient and cynical about this vaunted culture. In endless company meetings, it was the engineers who said stuff like: "My job is to write code; I don't know how to write the ten commandments." OR "If I want a code of ethics or a morality, I'll got to church. I don't expect to find it at work." OR "You're telling me that the bottom line isn't about profits? You're telling me that we don't lie to the customers every day about what this stuff can do and when it's going to be ready?" Eventually, those who could be bothered, cobbled something together that produced some permutation of the magical incantations of the time: value, quality, culture, customer.....revolution, creativity, energy, etc.
I was a Marxist at the time. It was the eighties; the destruction of the unions was going on apace. It was no longer cool for employees to ask for just compensation. What was cool was for employees to think of themselves as part owners of the corporations for which they slaved. The whole corporate culture thing was actually a means of super-exploitation --of making the employee identify with the company for reasons other than money. I mean if you ask someone to work eighty hours a week for the same salary they used to earn working forty hours, then you have to make them feel they're getting something in addition to the money: symbolic ownership of some kind, a heroic part in creating the new revolution. I don't know. It was some goddamn trick. I tried never to work more than forty hours. I tried to work as little of those forty as possible. I didn't believe it for a second. But lots of people did. And they got burned up and thrown away.
Business and ethics? Here's what I have learned after Thirty years about that:
1. The only thing that matters is money. The right to property beats the right to life by definition. That being the case, it is MEANINGLESS to talk about ethics.
2. Ethics only come into the picture as a form of disguised pragmatism. For example: A) What is more profitable: Installing air purifiers in this factory? Or paying higher medical bills for the workers that get injured? B) What is more costly: recalling these cars with faulty fuel tanks, or settling the eventual lawsuits out of court? C) What is more expensive: a worker in the U.S. or a worker in India? etc., etc.
3. The most sublime form of pragmatism by means of which "ethics" are introduced in biz talk, is when the subject of long term vs short term gains is introduced. What is better for business in the long run: logging all the wood without replacing it; or logging the wood and replacing it? What about if we can get the govt to replace it at taxpayer's expense?
You see. There is no rigor to the philosophy that speaks of business and ethics. ....assuming that business is an abbreviation for capitalist enterprise. Capitalism thrives on destruction and waste, on terror and despair.
Of course you could teach a class that asked something like if we had to come up with an economic system that was ethical, what would it look like?
But something tells me, you won't get to do that.
Joanna