Ethics & Business I: the Shell around Business Ethics

A number of regular readers of this blog (old habits die hard, so I still cannot avoid adding the usual rejoinder “all two or three of them”) have asked me what I’ve been doing between January and June, that has  kept me away from posting (and, prior to that, I was already in an apparently very low productivity streak, publishing no more than one post per month since at least August 2017). As it happens, last year I was presented with the opportunity to teach a course on Business Ethics in a prestigious university, and I grabbed it with both hands (and probably both feet too), as teaching is one of my overriding vocations, and ethics is probably my foremost passion. Well, probably I like having sex with my wife a bit more (but, alas! I have far less control over how much of it I can have, which tends to dull it a bit), and weightlifting would sit somehow between both in my list of preferences, but I hope you get the idea that thinking theoretically how to live the good life, and what the good life consists in, and sharing those thoughts with attentive younglings, sits pretty high between my priorities. However, being the kind of conscientious (bordering on obsessive) asshole this blog gives ample evidence I am, taking that opportunity required me to prepare it extensively and thoroughly, to ensure the students had an unforgettable learning experience, one that changed their lives forever (ideally for the better). Such preparation included extensively researching the materials to use, to ensure only top notch texts were used.

What I quickly found is that existing texts on the subject range between atrocious and abysmal. This may sound a bit harsh, a bit over the top, and a bit presumptuous… but it is the pure, unadulterated truth. Why students of economics and business administration the world over are exposed to half-baked, poorly understood by the authors themselves, uninterestingly presented ethical theories, in the most cursory manner, and then given a deluge of supposedly relevant, real-life, exciting and properly edited to highlight their ethical saliency, business situations that are supposed to teach them how to apply sound ethical reasoning, would probably merit a post of itself, having to do with how “social sciences” are taught in the Anglo-Saxon tradition (dominated by the case methodology developed in Harvard almost a century ago), how such tradition has contaminated almost all of academia (specially in Economics and BA, you cannot aspire to be taken seriously if you can’t throw a bunch of cases to illuminate or illustrate or rather obfuscate whatever you are supposed to be teaching) and how as a consequence kids leave their training without a goddamn clue about how to think ethically (one wonders if they leave with a clue about how to think at all, fullstop).

I thought it may be useful, for my students and myself, to represent in a single chart how most ethical teaching is done, versus how I thought it should be done (the “is-ought divide” would later on figure as one of the key concepts to grasp):

As you may see, in most business ethics textbooks, some space is given at the beginning to “describe” the main ethical traditions (at least deontology and utilitarianism, some may also include virtue ethics as a separate strands, but many do not even go in such abstruse nuances). I had to put describe between quotations as, given the space and the seriousness of the effort, it is almost impossible for even the most brilliant student to grasp the difference between them, which may very well be the point. The overall tone I’ve most frequently encountered is one of “guys, we are really sorry to bother you with this mushy and dusty and clearly irrelevant stuff… we know you are young and brilliant and enthusiastic and we will be talking about the shenanigans at Enron corporate board soon enough, as that is of course what excites your imagination and get your juices flowing, as well it should, not like all this boring disquisitions… just bear with us for a couple of pages so you can pronounce “deontology” and “utilitarianism” and that will be more than enough”. From such half-assed understanding, they go on to try to convey how ethical decisions may be taken (that’s the “normative” part). Of course, with such limited resources it is almost impossible to set a framework that makes the whole endeavor understandable: why should executives act ethically in the first place? The answer given, at best, is that acting “ethically” happens, almost miraculously, to be good for the business (some out-of-context appeal to Smith’s “hidden hand” is common at this point).

What if there is a situation in which acting “good” (according to some tradition) and acting in profit maximizing ways are clearly in conflict? Your average business ethics book has no answer to such case, other than saying the conflict can only be apparent, and that if we take everything in consideration (reputational damage, possible fines, loss of trust from stakeholders and whatnot) both ends cannot conflict. Well, of course they can! And indeed they do conflict!(and negating it happens to incense me, being such a dishonest and blatant violation of logic and historical example) but of course an author with a limited ethical understanding wouldn’t even be able to articulate why lying to the students about such possibility is, in the first place… unethical!

I’ll leave apart the infuriating fact that a “normative ethic” is a redundant concept, and that trying to give a semblance of respectability to a disjointed set of loose observations and biased (when not downright manipulative) recommendations by labelling them “descriptive ethics” is an oxymoron (I’ve equated it in other posts to attempting to create a “normative physics” or a “normative chemistry” to try to determine if it is good or bad that particles with opposite electrical charges attract each other, or that acids and alkalis react). But there is where the heart of the authors really lies, and to such quixotic (or rather, Sancho Panzic) enterprise they devote between 80 and 90% of their tracts. To painstakingly describe a random amount of (almost uncountable) decisions economic actors (from every walk of life) may face, and how such decisions have “ethical implications”, and how those implications should be weighed against each other. Sometimes they even circle back to their limp and incoherent definition of the traditions to bring them to bear in the analysis, almost apologizing for demanding such mental effort from their readers (as using words composed by more than five syllables is considered highly suspect, if not an outright hostile move in academic circles). But again, without a clear, forceful understanding of what the end goal of life is, or how a life well lived should look like, any attempt at discussion of the presented cases is wont to be an exercise in futility and equivocation. Indeed, in their attempt not to sound too judgmental (how old-fashioned would that be! How uncool!) they end up endorsing almost any imaginable outcome of the decision they present the student with, advocating for any possible side, and recommending every possible course of action short of outright violating the law.

In a sense, the authors are simply the all-too-expectable product of their society (which, let us not forget, is also ours), a society that leaves no space for values (other than the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain) or for any kind of transcendence. And as values require traditions that embed and explain and justify them, our society, under its own contingent dominant reason (a dominant reason that, like any other society before it, it tends to present as the only viable one, directly derived from reason itself and human nature), rejects all those traditions, ethical or otherwise, as so much deadweight to be cast aside and abandoned in the way to untrammeled individual (and individualistic) self-actualization and self-realization. A self-actualization and self-realization that requires their pursuers to admit they are mere lumps of matter, as free as a falling stone in a powerful gravitational field, mere profit maximizers programmed by evolution since the moment of their birth to blindly follow a predetermined set of behaviors that, in our time and place, impel them to seek the highest possible status by consuming as much as possible of high-prestige brands.

As any reader of this blog already knows (I can almost see your eyes rolling back whilst thinking “oh, no, here he goes again”), I happen to think all of that is hogwash, buying expensive thingies does not a good life make, you are only as unfree, or as determined, as you allow the dominant reason to make you, and the first step in liberating yourself from the yoke of such anti-humane, desiderative reason, is to recognize its origins and the interests it serves. Which leads me to how ethics should be taught: starting with a wide understanding of the kind of creature that formulates it (human beings), an understanding that requires accumulating knowledges from many fields (fields that in time of Kant were grouped under the common label “philosophical anthropology”, which has fallen mightily out of fashion): what people of different ages thought that reality was composed of (ontology), how, based on that ontology, they thought their own minds functioned, and could be trained and motivated to function even better. How such collective set of beliefs shaped their social relations and what they could produce together. How from that level of production they could compete with other neighboring societies with a different set of beliefs, motivations and institutions, giving shape to what we know as human history.

And only when you have a working understanding of all that subjacent material does it make sense to turn your attention to how they proposed to answer the question of how the good life looked like, and how best to pursue it (both individually and as members of a social group), the description of how such answers were arrived at, and what particular form they took being the teaching of ethical traditions that should be at the core of nay ethics book, as the training tool to make the mind better at ethical thinking is honing its understanding of how different ages and persons have indeed reasoned ethically when answering their own dilemmas and challenges. I like to use the analogy of weight training, as it is the simplest, better understood method of developing capabilities we are not born with: by judiciously applying a gradually increasing stress to certain muscles we make those muscles grow stronger. By making our mind mull and ponder and consider and weigh the ideas of the great thinkers of the past we male our mind grow more capable of developing ideas of its own, and to apply them successfully to the circumstances it finds itself into.

So, on top of that deep, foundational understanding of what makes humans tick (the anthropology part) and of that rich, nuanced description of the answers about how to live that the most brilliant thinkers of our civilizational unit have given, and only after such foundations have been securely laid, does it make sense to discuss how they may apply in a specifically business context. Trying to jump to the business “application” without a proper foundation is a way of cheating the students, making them (falsely, as so many recent examples of corporate misbehavior attest) believe they have a developed capability they lack, and are able to apply judgments that will in the end fail them.

All of which is to say, as all the materials I reviewed were essentially crap (under my unduly harsh, critical, old-fashioned, elitist, grumpy, unreasonably demanding, curmudgeonly, misanthropic, arrogant, obstreperous, haughty, suspicious and idiosyncratic opinion) I decided I had to write my own book on ethics, following the structure I highlighted on the left of the graphic. A short tract, oriented to university students, although highly competent ones (I would be teaching in a postgrad, after all, a master in international management), so no holding back on the rich vocabulary or the convoluted conceptual structures presented. Something short, as in these harried times who has time for those majestic, sophisticated university texts of the past. I aimed originally at something around 100 pages/ 50,000 words. Short and to the point, or, like my lifting straps “short & sweet”. I started around October last year, but as those of you that have written a book surely are familiar with, one thought led to another, every idea required a bit more exploration and clarification, entire currents had to be added (you cannot leave the stoics out of an ethics treatise! Nor the cynics! If you present Nietzsche you have to first introduce Schopenhauer… I’m sure you get the point) and soon I was strenuously fighting to have at least half the materials ready as the beginning of the classes was fast approaching, and I had only a third of the whole thing (which I had to complement with well-thought-out cases, plus group dynamics, plus supporting materials). So no much time for blogging. On the other hand, I’ll remind my kind, patient and entirely non-paying readers that I do this mainly to improve my writing skills (you know the whole “practice makes perfect” shtick), and frankly, for the past six months it’s not writing practice what I’ve lacked (Jeez, some days I even had to forgo training if I wanted to have enough pages to give my students to read! There are very few instances on this Earth of things I would accept to prioritize over moving a loaded bar for a predefined number of sets and reps).

So that’s the explanation for my much reduced output these last months. Towards the end of May I finished the whole book, one I am mighty proud of, by the way (on whose contents I intend to use extensively in this blog), and am currently looking for an editor to publish it (which will probably require a load of extra work to make it half-readable, I know). In my next post (you probably saw this one coming) I’ll share with my devoted readership the main results I reached. I’ll close this post summarizing the unavoidable conclusion I extracted from my deep diving in the existing literature on business ethics: the whole field is a dishonest mess, an oxymoron lacking a moral compass, lacking a faith in the very possibility of its own internal coherence and external relevance, shot with consequentialist thinking through and through, it sees actions, beliefs, people itself as “resources” to be substituted for one another if a different mix may produce additional output of the only currency it recognizes which, of course, is not “the good life”, or a life well lived as understood internally by a free, rational agent, but the ability to purchase more material goods.

And it cannot lose time considering such abstract question as what the good life for a rational agent may be because it has no concept of what such agent would look like, to begin with, or what it should desire or how it makes sense to act on those desires. Although it is not entirely true the discipline does not rely (implicitly, as it happens) on those concepts. It assumes them from the zeitgeist, it receives them uncritically from the age’s dominant reason (that tells its teachers that the only intelligible goal of life is to feel the maximum pleasure, the only thing that gives pleasure is to have more social status than your neighbor, and the only measure of status is the amount of money you have at your disposal at any given moment). Business Ethics as I’ve found it explained and taught accepts enthusiastically such crappy ideological package, and is an essential component in its transmittal to the new generations. That’s why it has to be fought against, tooth and nail, with every last atom of strength of every well-meaning person.