More thoughts about the collapse of our civilization – or why bottling the sun is so difficult

Few times in our life (in most cases, no times at all) can one assert confidently that he has stood in the frontlines of our species technological advance, and looked resolutely across the trenches, if we may use such a bellicose expression, and sized the strength of the enemy forces (which, in this case, are the unholy alliance of ignorance, barbarism, regression, poverty, need, hunger, conflict, tribalism, superstition and squalor that take over societies once science stops progressing and technology stagnates). And I’m sad to report to my attentive readers that the enemy forces are, indeed, much stronger than ours, and that sooner rather than later it is our fate to be overcome, and to witness the unavoidable collapse I referred to in the title of this post. My admired (and today not widely read) Arnold J. Toynbee finished the introduction to his monumental Study of History considering that may be Western Civilization (the inheritor of the Greco-Roman tradition) would be the first to escape the, until then inescapable, cycle of growth and decay that had bedeviled every previous differentiated human group until his own times. Sorry, Arnold, but you were wrong about that one, the West had its run, and it was a good one, but its days of vigor, its days of being able to successfully solve the challenges that its environment presented it with, are mostly over. Oswald Spengler is the one that got it right before you, and the West is, undeniably, in full decadence mode, and has been for almost half a century now.  However, and regardless of the apocalyptic image I’ve conjured, I will make in the following paragraphs a case for a guarded optimism.

But first, some background. I spent the last week trying to position my company to win a bid for doing some work at the heart of ITER, the experimental fusion reactor being built in Cadarache, in the French Provence. I won’t go into details of the content of the bid, as it is understandably very sensitive, but it allowed me to get a firmer understanding of how it is going, and what the future may bring to such ambitious and magnificent endeavor. Something I’m already quite familiar with, as we have been already working for them for the past eight years, and I regularly audit our work there, which allows me to monitor how things are going. Everybody just barely familiar with the history of the installation would tell you it is not going so well: when it was created (in the famous Geneva summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985, conceptual design started in 1988 and was approved in 2001 -in a scaled-down version that already accepted the fact that it would not produce “sustainable, continued fusion”, but just “longish” pulses of it). At that time it was aiming at producing first plasma in the first decade of the XXI century. After some vicious political battles in its first decade of life (including where to build it, the abandonment of the project by the USA and its later return), it was settled in 2005 that France would be the place, the construction was initiated in August 2010 and the production of “first plasma” was pushed back to the end of the second decade of the century (for a critical account of the situation, see The really screwed up history of fusion energy ).

As is wont to happen in these complex projects where you push hard again the limits of what we, as a civilization, can produce, costs kept ballooning (current price tag is calculated to be around 20 billion euros, but I don’t know of anybody who thinks it can actually be completed at that cost, which does not include the payments in kind by the “Domestic Agencies” of some of the costlier components), planned milestones kept not being met and the current expected date for first plasma has been pushed back to 2025. A date that, between you and me, is not very likely to be met either, as the tougher, most complex part of the construction has yet to be started: assembling the cryostat and the vacuum vessel that should contain the fusion reaction, something that until now, as far as we know, in the whole damn universe, only happens in the heart of the stars.

Well, in the heart of the stars and in each one of the thirty of so Tokamaks that have been built so far (give or take a few ones in secret military facilities that have obviously not been counted) plus in the dozens of explosions (thankfully, only for testing purposes) of hydrogen atomic bombs that rely on fusion to unleash the stupendous amounts of energy they are famous for… and, in case you missed it, ITER is still not going to “produce” energy in any meaningful sense. To keep the fusion reaction going for a few seconds (which would already be a huge technological success, and an epochal advance over everything achieved so far, as in the biggest experimental installations built to date the fusion happens in “pulses” of a few milliseconds) it will require gargantuan amounts of electricity to feed its ravenous magnets (the “bottle” that keeps the plasma confined, and thus dense enough for the light hydrogen atoms to collide and form helium, freeing energy in the process, is made of ultra-powerful magnetic fields that need as much electric power as a small city to run). What you typically see at the side of any self-respecting power plant (a park of transformers to convert the electricity it generates into high-voltage before pouring it in the grid, so it minimizes the transport losses) is also here, and at a humongous scale, but for the opposite purpose (not to convert the energy it generates to a higher voltage, but to convert the energy it consumes to a lower one).

So, you may wonder, why are we spending vast sums of money in a project whose end result always seems to be twenty years away? Indeed, this last year has been rife with smallish companies promising alternative approaches to achieve fusion reactions for a fraction of the cost, in a few years, that would make ITER entirely redundant (a brief summary of some of them here: Alternative technologies for fusion (if you thought Tokamaks weren't loony enough) ). Well, not to put too fine a grain around it, those brilliant, bold, innovative schemes have, as Charles Seife put it in the first link I provided, “a snowball in hell’s chance of ever coming to fruition”. I can think of only one way of losing your money that is even surer than investing in a fusion startup promising a revolutionary fast & cheap (compared with the existing “establishment” path of ITER and Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility) track to commercial fusion energy: burning it in a chimney. And in the chimney scenario at least you can get some comfort out of it, in the form of heat and light, which is more that you can say of the first option… Explaining why it is so will take me the rest of this post, and will allow me to weave many of my previous hunches about the root cause of our technological stagnation and impending civilizational collapse, as the main cause of the collapse is the inability to give answer to the growing challenges we face, an inability that is in turn caused by the stagnation, or rather the stagnation is but one of the most apparent manifestations of such inability.

But before we discuss the complex realities of how scientific knowledge is transformed in usable technologies that actually change how we live and work, it is of some interest to wonder why is the media (and, apparently, a good number of naïve VC investors) stubbornly not reporting this, and falling once and again for the hucksterism of this miracle solution to all of humanity’s energy needs. Hint: it doesn’t apply only to energy… In this case, the American journalists, science writers, publishers, and public in general, have all been successfully primed to enjoy (and find so satisfying as to not get too caught on little tiny weeny details like the overall plausibility of the story) news about the sclerotic bureaucracy prevailing in other countries, especially in old Europe, as opposed to the dynamism, entrepreneurship and can-do (which so easily morphs into gung-ho) culture of the greatest country on earth (conveniently, theirs’). So a lumbering, multi-national, state-funded giant project taking place in foreign shores (and what shores! In a most traditional part of most socialist France, no less!), with a governance structure that isolates it from any kind of “market signal” (an isolation that is extremely noticeable when you present something in their great council room, festooned with the photographs of the heads of the organization, invariably old males with suits and ties) is just too good a target to let it pass, even more so when compared with the wild dreams of young private enterprising men with only a thin veneer of engineering or physics and lots of management jargon sprouting from their mouths, invariably clad in jeans and polo shirts and with presentation skills honed in TED Talks and the VC circuit.

But let us not be sidelined by the vagaries of the new-technology-pimping branch of the publishing industry (“Science”, the “MIT Technology review” and the like). They have a laughably poor track record identifying what technological trend may actually work and prosper, as they are too invested in the results and too blinded by the interests of advertisers, direct and indirect. They are not the real culprits of our, by now almost half a century long, technological stagnation (outside of the limited realm of data processing and transmission). The real root cause, then? My humble, partial, not necessarily fully-formed opinion is that “research” (something notoriously difficult to define rigorously, I’ll take mostly the idea of “Research programs” as developed by Imre Lakatos) has gone mostly off-track. Physics is stuck in a rut since the middle of the last century (when the formulation of the Standard Model was essentially completed), and since then it’s been mostly a long, torturous trip to nowhere through the rabbit hole of string theory and supersymmetry. Chemistry is (as much as chemists hate to recognize it) essentially a branch of physics after Pauli’s unification and explanation of the periodic table and its elements’ features by the structure of their electrons’ orbitals.

As a side note/ rant, the situation has been aggravated by the mostly pathetic attempt of the humanities to catch up applying the same failed methodology that essentially killed all progress in physics: isolate the most advanced students in universities and create a separate career path for them consisting essentially in reading each other’s mental masturbations, in a language as arcane and uninteresting as possible (because hey! If everybody could understand it everybody could judge and contribute, and how do you justify appropriating an increasing slice of the social pie by a coterie of self-proclaimed experts then?). What incentives do we provide to “researchers”, doesn’t matter of what discipline? What do we pay them differentially to deliver? Discoveries? Ranked by their usefulness? Nah, that’s too difficult to plan and measure. We incentivize them to write, and to publish in peer reviewed journals, even if what they consistently keep producing and publishing is utter rubbish, lacking any interest to anybody outside of their more and more reduced field. Sounds too harsh? Anybody from the inside, when considering things with equanimity, will end up agreeing: Academic books are not meant to be read . Please note that I do not intend to have a recipe for solving such sorry state of affairs (other than my modest proposal to close all humanities faculties and universities, and look for alternative ways of teaching them that allowed its practitioners to escape from the gilded cage which currently lines their pockets -modestly-at the price of killing their creativity and ability to innovate). I can only give notice of how messed up things are, and how we are paying as a society for such state of affairs much more dearly than what we think.

To make things worse, the organizational environment in which much of that research takes place has really been assigned a different purpose by the powers that be. Ideally, universities should be hallowed places where knowledge for knowledge’s sake is cherished and celebrated, where the truth is selflessly pursued and transmitted, where the new generation of scholars and researchers, of inventors and entrepreneurs are taught by their generous predecessors the building blocks of their respective disciplines. Which is nice and lofty and good, if it happens at all in a most residual way. Because, as much as it pains me to say it, the real goal of universities, what determines if they languish or prosper, if they get stupendous funds to furnish dazzling facilities and attract the most sublime talent is not how good they are at generating new knowledge and finding truth, but how good they are at providing a competitive advantage to their students in a labor market deemed to be ever more competitive (all those brilliant Indians and Chinese youngsters, coming from a tradition of much harder work and study than our own kids! In an ever more open and globalized economy! Man, nothing short of Yale or Harvard can guarantee our scions a good shot at the good life if they have to compete with those work-obsessed Asians!) We lavish money and resources on universities for them to produce… as much social stratification and lack of social mobility as possible. The search for truth, and knowledge, and the advancement of science ara an afterthought, and they will foster as much as is compatible with their primary goal, the one their alumni and the parents of their prospective students are really willing to pay big bucks for: giving their graduates a leg up in the game of life.

So the only thing I can recommend is that we stick to our guns in those areas where some advance, costly as it may look like, is being made, regardless of how slowly it proceeds or how much more costly it ends up being than what we initially projected. For example, and back to my original line, at some point in the next two to three years ITER will reassess its schedule and recognize it needs even more money to be completed, and a few more years (so no first plasma in 2025, although given the current level of the works it may be as soon as 2027 or 28). That money and extra time should be granted as, again, this is our best bet, as a species, to do something that is really remarkable, epochal, worthy of being remembered by future ages of the world. Look, I love Wikipedia, find Waze convenient and think Amazon makes my life much richer and easier. But I don’t think the XXI century will be remembered by any of them. The iPhone is a technological wonder, but again, I don’t see it exciting the imagination of the citizens of the XXXI century much more than our own imagination is excited by the little clay models of ships that the Egyptians produced (and that can be admired in any medium-sized archaeology museum): an ingenious bauble, an amusing and pleasant-looking toy not especially worthy of respect or admiration. But replicating what happens at the heart of the magnificent fiery balls of primordial fire that light the firmament for minutes on end! Whoa, that is something indeed that would put all previous achievements of the human race to shame!

Of course, we may shrug collectively our shoulders and say that such intergenerational, inter-civilizational comparison is childish to begin with, and we should better invest our efforts in more pressing, immediate concerns like ending world poverty, or curing preventable diseases (and then non-preventable ones) and curing death itself. I concede that those are all equally worthy endeavors, that if achieved would also merit the unbounded admiration of the ages. But none of them is likely to succeed if we cannot first solve the so far unsolvable problem of making readily available enormous amounts of energy to power desalination plants, pharma laboratories, research facilities, agricultural implements and the like that are required as a precondition for those other equally super-worthy goals, without toasting ourselves or making the planet inhabitable through hothouse gasses emissions. Yep, I know that one experimental facility, doesn’t matter how big, in a remote corner of France doesn’t automatically solve that problem either, but not being able to complete it because we, as a society (or rather, as a collection of societies that includes the most populous, the most economically advanced, the one with most scientific resources at its disposal and the best governed of our little world) just couldn’t muster the willpower and couldn’t sustain the effort for long enough would speak volumes of what we are really made of.

That’s why at the beginning I resorted to a military metaphor, in which I saw myself (even more so if I can close the deal and end up participating more directly in the enterprise) as carrying the banner of a technological society with science, empiricism and a concern for the common welfare on its side, as aligned against the forces that have overpowered our species for millennia. Not being able to complete ITER would be a major loss in that eternal struggle, a confirmation that our best days are behind us, that we reached indeed a peak in what we as a species are capable of, and what we can expect now at best is to hold our ground and decline gently and slowly as we squander the non-renewable resources of our finite planet, squabbling more and more violently for a perpetually shrinking pie. Look, I have seen firsthand what renouncing to big, complex, technologically advanced projects does to a society, because that is for all practical purposes what we have been doing with nuclear energy (what we now call “conventional nuclear”) and long range space exploration involving humans. When it got complex we essentially abandoned innovation, and got contented with what we already had achieved, and you know what? In technology, as in physical fitness, there is no “maintenance mode”. You either progress or regress.

And boy, are we regressing! When it comes to building nuclear power plants we are well behind what we knew (collectively, although such skill was mastered by some societies much more than by others) how to do routinely forty years ago: Olkiluoto in Finland, Flamanville in France (and most likely Hinkley Point and Wylfa in the UK) will most likely be super-costly failures not because “nuclear energy” in abstract has stopped being profitable. That’s as silly as saying that building ICE cars has stopped being profitable, or that building desktop computers has stopped being profitable (both things that may also be close to being claimed by unsubtle analysts of social reality), which really means that conditions have changed and we, as a society, without much conscious deliberation or enlightened debate, have changed the rules of the game so certain activities and developments that made sense before stop making sense now. Which is all well and good, I’m not saying we shouldn’t change the rules ever, as we learn of the true cost of some technologies, and try to internalize what were borne before by all of us as externalities (so we ended up paying all the same, regardless of who benefitted by them).

But that shouldn’t hide the fact that the real reason every new reactor (started after 2000) in the “western world” will be a costly failure is, first and foremost, because we as a society have lost the collective know-how to be able to build them as planned. Simple as that. We don’t know how to lift the heavy components. We do not know how to erect the tubing and leak test the pressure equipment. We do not know how to weld and inspect the welding to the necessary standards… Now, don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying there isn’t a single individual on the face of the Earth with the ability to do each of those mildly difficult activities, what I’m saying is there are not enough of them to plan for them properly, to perform them at the required rate and cost, and to teach a new generation of engineers, draughtsmen and operators how to keep on doing them and refining them predictable and at scale.

And such a loss of collective ability permeates all the rest of the economy. Yes, we have become better at installing wind turbines (and don’t get me wrong, that is something great and to be celebrated also), yohooo! And to line a field with PV cells… but that doesn’t have the same cascading effect, that doesn’t lift the technological level of a whole society, that doesn’t serve as a seedbed for engineering talent as much as the building of massive nuclear plants did in the second half of last century. And it shows. Any other sector ends up being penalized by such lack of big projects, technologically ambitious, that forced the engineering schools to churn out graduates and attracted those graduates to use and develop their technical skills in the first place.

A very similar story could be told about manned space flight. You may have read that Elon Musk achieved a significant milestone this year by launching in February his Falcon Heavy rocket (essentially, three Falcon 9 rockets ungainly put together), the biggest, most powerful rocket in operation by far… and about half as powerful as the mighty Saturn V that took the first humans to the moon… in 1969! If you follow the industry, you find a very similar story: after the demise of the Saturn program we just have lost boatloads of knowledge and experience, that some private firms are trying to recover, amid many setbacks, delays, unexpected accidents and uncountable difficulties. Because, again, when technology stops progressing it immediately starts regressing, and in most fields that’s where we are at: installing windmills is something we know how to do since a millennium ago, and PV we essentially mastered a century ago, we have just decided to do it at a bigger scale and thus make it not so dastardly expensive, although they are still expensive enough not to grow at all the moment you stop subsidizing them. But don’t suffer, we can collectively decide to subsidize them as much as we like, that would simply be the exact reverse of “nuclear energy is not profitable”, and thus it is entirely within our power: it is us collectively, as a society, who decide what is profitable and what is not by setting through laws and regulations what level of safety and innovation we are willing to live with.  

Which doesn’t mean that we cannot reverse such regression, through renewed effort and considerable investment (mostly public, sorry but private money is timid and risk averse, and tends to flow only to potential monopolies where it can be assured of predictable, above-average returns). The question that arises, then, is “this” (be it ITER, or big thermosolar plants that never seem to work, or mega-constellations of satellites in Low Earth Orbit that nobody seems to know how to monetize) what we should be investing big bucks in? aren’t there other big science projects that could deliver us cleaner energy “at command” (baseload, regardless of how much the wind blows or the sun shines, factors that are still out of our control)? Well, there are: Next Generation Nuclear (keep on dreaming...) but don’t hold your breath for society suddenly deciding forty years of maligning every form and shape of nuclear energy has been a costly error and changing course… To illustrate the folly of such expectations I will bring in a personal note: Do you know who wrote her PhD dissertation on the design of a molten salt reactor (which, according to the linked article, is the spearhead of the most promising technology to correct all of traditional nuclear evils)? My mom, that’s who. Forty years ago (already w five kids delivered). And it seemed back then as close to being commercially viable as it probably seems to the journos at “Wired” today. So I wouldn’t be surprised if my own sons (or grandsons) write forty years from now how advanced and promising some designs for “new nuclear” look like and how they are the best option to decarbonize the economy, something that at the current speed will still not have happened fifty years from now, as all the increase in renewables has gone to substitute the aging nuclear park, (i.e. a non-CO2 emitting energy source is essentially replacing another non-CO2 emitting energy source), and in the meanwhile we have not minimally dented the total production of very-CO2-emitting coal and fuel plants, or created the capacity to move around in electric cars…

So the best case for guarded optimism I can make (if you can call optimism considering the new dark ages will come in fifty to one hundred years, instead of in a couple of decades) is that at least, in a few areas, through the joint investment of most advanced economies, we are still trying to progress. It is ugly, and costly, and will still break our hearts a number of times when new delays are announced and additional cost overruns are uncovered and expected milestones keep not being met, but we are still putting our best talent on it. “It” being doing things that were never done before, and thus pushing the technological frontier of what our species is able to achieve, and thus keeping the flame of hope alight that the complex challenges that we face as a society may be, if not ultimately solved, at least ameliorated. Because when that flame of hope is extinguished, and people stop believing the future may be better than the present, and all we can expect is more of the same in terms of misery, squalor, inequality and a degrading environment, they tend to have little patience for the existing social compact, and that’s when the pitchforks and the torches come out, and the powerful of today can start worrying…  

Ethics & Business II: Business Ethics in a Nutshell

As mentioned in my previous post, I recently finished teaching a course on Business Ethics to students of a Master in International Management, which has forced me to review as much of the existing literature on the subject as I could, and to conclude that most of it is essentially useless or worse. Back to the title, I wanted to take the occasion to condense in a few paragraphs the summary of all the research and the thinking I have been doing since October last year. Consider it the Cliffs Notes of my latest literary production:

Ethics – how to live

There is considerable social agreement about what is “good” (although as in so many areas, agreement on the general outlook, or the wide brushstrokes, may conceal a good deal of disagreement on the fine details and nuances). A good guy is generous, has other people interests’ in his mind when acting, is just and equitable, gives everyone his due and does not shortchange others to gain a bit more himself:

We may leave aside for a moment the fact that different people may perceive exactly the same action (Action 1 in the previous schema, say) as occupying different positions in the continuum. If I give some money to charity I may judge it as being a very virtuous thing, while you may think I did it to show off (virtue signaling), or to gain a fiscal deduction, or that given how much I earn and the wretched state of the world it is still not enough. Regardless of how well trained in ethics we are, it is simply the nature of human language that the assignment of value (remember, that pesky concept that physics and chemistry cannot capture or properly measure) is both imprecise and subjective, so we are wont to disagree about the exact amount of it of each action shows. Which shouldn’t obscure the fact that, again, there is wide agreement in the relative position of different actions, so my giving money to charity is almost universally understood to be “better” (more virtuous, more praise deserving) than selling addictive drugs to teenagers out of school or mugging people at knife point.

Now, even if we accept (as I do) the fact that there is an objective truth to the amount of moral virtue of every action we freely decide to perform (as virtue, and praiseworthiness in general, requires freedom to have any meaning at all: no freedom implies no possibility of being virtuous or evil) we still need to inquire if such “socially perceived virtue” is indeed conductive to the good life, to the kind of life we should (that pesky verb again) aspire to live. This apparently simple question turns out to be fiendishly difficult to answer in a way that is universally considered valid, and indeed every single attempt at answering it, since the times of Socrates (and probably well before that) has in some sense failed, as some thinker or other has come out sooner rather than later pointing out to some formal defect in the underlying logic of the answer that purportedly rendered it moot.

This is where historical reasoning normally kicks in with full force (in philosophy books, not certainly in business ethics ones) and attempts to explain why, for the kind of creatures we humans happen to be, which include the fact we are endowed with reason and we have to live in community with our fellow beings, for which we instinctively feel empathy, it is indeed best to try to live ethically (closer to the complex of behavior causing perceptions under label “B” in my graph) than the other way round, and thus the source of the normativity of ethical theory lies either in its anchoring in human nature or in the dictates of abstract reason. I feel a lot of sympathy for historical reason, and enjoy as much as the next guy dabbling in it, but at this point I won’t consider the matter entirely settled (that narrative went more or less OK ‘til the Enlightenment, but has been seriously weakened afterwards by Nietzsche and, closer to our days, by Post-modernism, if you want the details you’ll need to wait until my book is released, as both are discussed at length in there). For the purpose of the present post (summary of how to sensibly apply ethical thinking to a business environment) I’ll just consider it settled: it is a fact of the matter that the good life, the worthy life, the life that recommends itself to any rational being, the life that should be pursued, is the virtuous life, the praiseworthy life, the life that most ethical traditions coincide in recommending (regardless of “why” it may be so).

Remember, what such virtuous life consists in is basically agreed by the aforementioned traditions (Nietzsche’s being the odd one out), and can be summarized in following two precepts:

·         Equanimity rule (directly derived from the venerable “golden rule”): don’t give your own interests more weight than those of others. Don’t treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself. Try to adopt and impersonal, impartial point of view when deciding how to act, so you don’t favor yourself just for being you

·         Perfectibility rule: develop your capabilities as much as you can, giving priority to those that can be of use to your fellow men (and thus, that by the application of the previous rule, make you a more useful member of society)

It is also widely agreed that such schematic formulations cannot exhaust every conceivable dilemma (ethical or otherwise) we may find in the business of conducting our daily lives. No statement of a rule to be universally and unconditionally followed, doesn’t matter how pithy or how extended, may aspire to cover the almost infinite combination of circumstances and peculiar features each of our free actions is framed in, so it may recommend (or disqualify) unambiguously each one of those actions. We will discuss towards the end of the post (hopefully) to what extent, then, are such pithy formulations of ethical directives useful or not, as some authors have deduced, from the impossibility of being applied to each possible situation we face, that ethics is simply not amenable to being formulated as a definite set of rules, ad that supposed universal “principles” are at best a distraction, and at worst an unnecessary obstacle when trying to find out how to live (a good example of such position can be found in Jonathan Dancy’s book Ethics Without Principles, although many of the objections to what we may call “understanding of Ethics as finding universally applicable rules” were already presented in the deservedly famous Ethics, Inventing Right or Wrong by J. L. Mackie). Let’s just assume for the time being that those rules do indeed apply, are useful, and are valid indications of how to lead a good life (both seen from outside, by our fellow humans, and felt from inside, as self-fulfilling, rewarding ways of living). What do they have to do with the conduct of business, and the performance of our professional activities?

Business Ethics – How to exchange commodities (including our own labor)

Before we discuss the peculiarities of how Ethics applies to business situations, a couple of reminders are in order:

1.       Regardless of what the US supreme court may say, Corporations are not people. You may grant rights to them, and you may impose duties on them, but such rights and duties are, from an ethical perspective, legal fictions. There is no such a thing as a sentient, conscious, “mind of the corporation”, able to take decisions (apart from and distinct of those of its different executives, within their respective areas), and thus morally deserving praise or blame. One of the central terms within the discipline of Business Ethics is “Corporate Social Responsibility”, and enormous amounts of ink have been spilled discussing what that responsibility consists in, and how far does it extend. Executives, which we can safely presume are (mostly) human being do indeed have a responsibility for acting in “socially acceptable” ways, for taking decisions that result in a net positive for the corporations they represent and for the societies in which they operate. But the nebulous collectives that have endowed them with such decision power have no "responsibility", social or otherwise.

2.       For a majority of their life, the activity that occupies more awake time of almost everybody is precisely work. If the average adult (between 18 and 65 years old) is awake 112 hours a week, you can expect him to devote more than half of those hours to his job (including getting there and returning from it). There is no way you can define, orient, inspire or direct a meaningful way to live (which is precisely the core of what ethics is about) that doesn’t address that time. There cannot be an ethics that doesn’t include, or that carves a separate space for, or identifies different principles to regulate, how to behave at work, or how to approach business deals, or how to treat subordinates and co-workers. Furthermore, the attempts to create such ethic, an ethic of the “private life”, to be governed by a set of principles, and different from a “work ethic”, governed by a distinct set, understood as attuned to the peculiarities and separate dynamics of a mythical realm called “the market”, are not neutral or objective or value-free. They typically constitute a naked attempt to justify quite unsavory behavior (the shameless exploitation of our fellow humans, which in turn requires denying their inherent dignity and “exchangeability” with ourselves) with a veneer of sophistry and bad empiricism, appealing to “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” and the unverifiable assumption that certain relationships of production (collectively known as free-market capitalism) automatically ensure such stupendous happiness by ensuring everybody maximizes the utility they extract from what they consume, and produces using with maximal efficiency the means at their disposal (as summarized in a passage in the textbook on Economics by Samuelson and Nordhaus that I’ve quoted several times, and which manages to be both tautological and disingenuous).

What we should conclude from both points is that business ethics, as commonly described, is highly suspect of constituting a rationalization of rapacious behavior. A rationalization facilitated by the way it is typically taught, in isolation from the rich ethical tradition from which it could benefit (expounded in my previous post). If you zoom in what are the responsibilities of corporations, and how to balance the demands of sustainability and profit maximizing, and then disguise your own lack of an adequate framework for even formulating the problem with a myriad of “cases” that can be argued one way or the other (and that end up transmitting that this ethical stuff is really complex and confusing and it doesn’t matter much what you end up deciding because for any outcome you can find someone willing to defend that it was the right thing to do). A fine way of training lawyers (again, that is where the case methodology originated), but not certainly one for developing ethical excellence in economics (or BA) students…

What I’m saying with this is that “business ethics” cannot aspire to be a complete ethics, detached from the question of the good life and a solid theoretical framework of what is good for us, rational animals. Now, the peculiarity of business is, as I intimated in the opening of this section, that it is an institution devoted to the exchange of commodities. What is a commodity? I’ll take Lionel Robbins definition stating that it is a piece of stuff (or of our own time) that has an economic value (that we can put a price on), which in turn assumes that such piece of stuff or time can be put to alternative uses (or to the same use by alternative persons). That means that when we exchange commodities (again, our own time included) the main question, as long as the exchange is voluntary, is not one of ultimate ends, or of how conductive to our own perfectibility the exchange is, but of its fairness, of how just it is. Thus, of the two main aspects of ethics (the two main precepts we mentioned towards the end of previous section), business ethics is mainly concerned with the first (equanimity), as the ultimate mark of a fair transaction is that we would accept it from both sides, if we exchanged places with the other party we would still consider it advantageous (if not, if we are the only ones taking advantage of it, if we are somehow fleecing the other party, it is doubtlessly unethical to engage in it).

Which is all great and good, but puts us in a bit of a bind, specially when we turn our attention to that most vaunted position (one which was identified by Alasdair McIntyre in his arch famous After Virtue as a paradigmatic figure of our times), that of the Manager, the person that corporations choose to coordinate the activities (and thus, to give instructions) to other people. A manager must maximize the output of his team, that is the only possible way to discharge the fiduciary responsibility he has been assigned. But for such maximization to happen, he must consider the members of said team as means, not as ends in themselves, again, because the end in itself can only be the profit maximization. Indeed, the whole of economic theory is built in the essential interchangeability of people, which are but one resource more among others (remember our Robbinsian definition of commodity, taken from the master’s conceptualization of the discipline: resources that by definition admit of alternative uses), and are thus to be thrown off the productive process if said process can be accomplished more efficiently (more cheaply) using machines, or using people based in countries with lower salaries. Something that managers all the world over have been doing with verve and gusto on a monumental scale for the last half century (which only shows that their economic training was impeccable, and impeccably unbalanced by any ethical concern).

So, alas! Business ethics has to deal with justice, and justice is by far the messier aspect of the whole field of practical philosophy, because it has to do with the competing claims of different people, with different histories, different arguments that can be expressed more or less convincingly, independently of their “intrinsic” merit (if there is even such a thing), and thus it very easily degrades into casuistry. We all agree in a number of ethical positions: flogging a man that robbed a crumb of bread because he was hungry? That’s bad, bad, bad. Raping a woman to satisfy your wanton lust? Superbad and inexcusable. Slavery (benefitting from it, or simply standing by if it happens in your country)? Totally bad and despicable. But when it comes to who deserves what… we haven’t progressed much since the time of the original sophists (the practitioners of their trade now are called “lawyers”, at least in the West), that boasted they could make the “weaker argument seem stronger” (and win the trial). 

Which doesn’t mean that business ethics can’t be taught, or that it necessarily has to be as poorly taught as it actually is (with the predictably mushy results we can daily admire in the press). Some of the cases can be used to illustrate the inherent tension between the different actors involved in business relationship (the workers, the capital owners, the consumers, the rest of society), and some guidelines can be provided about the basis for adjudicating between their competing claims (as I did in this series of posts: Organizational Justice I, Organizational Justice II and Organizational Justice III, in which I essentially argued for the superiority of a Kantian approach over a utilitarian one). I’m just saying that trying to cut corners, and jump in the discussion of cases without having carefully laid out the foundations of why one kind of life (the examined one, that recognizes the essential equality and dignity of all human beings, and on the other hand requires us to develop our potential abilities to perfection, prioritizing those most useful to our fellow humans) is better than other (the unexamined pursuit of social status through the hoarding of material goods as prescribed by a cancerous dominant reason that is uncritically accepted as the only way to live) can only end in causing the confusion of the students, and breeding in them the cynicism and disenchantment of which they provide such ample evidence once they leave the hallowed grounds of academia and start fending for themselves in the world of greedy corporations, all too eager to put all that cynicism and disenchantment to good use for their own ends.