A couple weeks ago I started enumerating
the things I most disliked about the literature I had to review to update my Business
Ethics classes, coming up with the following list:
·
Acritical
(many times unacknowledged) acceptance of the current social arrangement
(post-industrial, globalized, short-term oriented capitalism)
·
Exclusive
focus on a slice of human life (salaried employment) that, when taken in
isolation, can only be very problematic from an ethical standpoint
·
Disregard
for the tradition (let’s call it “non-business ethics”) of the preexisting
field it should have arisen from
·
Underlying
assumption (sadly, not borne enough by the facts) that being ethically good
helps the business earn more money
·
Lack
of commitment to any kind of “substantive” values (so old-fashioned!) other,
that is, than a facile hyper-individualism of the utilitarian stripe
·
Excessive
emphasis on recent articles, normally very shallow and of little originality,
at the price of ignorance of deeper and more difficult primary sources (books)
But, due to other commitments, back
then I was able to expand only up to the fourth point. I would like in this
post to finish with my criticism, so I can move to more pressing matters (like
what my British friends are likely to do with their country in the following
weeks). So let’s get back to debunking the incredibly naïve (and, most likely,
incredibly false) assumption that helping companies make more money is in some
way or form a legitimate justification for them behaving “ethically”…
4.
Assumption
that being good = earning more money
In my previous post I pointed to the
flimsiness of the studies purporting to show a correlation between ethical
behavior and shareholder value creation, starting with the fact that the real “goodness”
of the prevalent behavior of any given company is, for all practical purposes,
impossible to measure. That’s why “researchers” normally look for some proxy
like existence of a code of conduct, a “creed” (mission, vision and set of
professed values), issuance of an annual “Corporate Social Responsibility
Report” in which they announce to the world how many good deeds they have
performed, and how much they foster diversity internally, and how respectful
towards the environment they are. All such nice declamations are, of course,
perfectly compatible with a toxic business culture that forces everybody to
work 60 hours a week with no overpay (hey! If they are so zealous as to do that
“entirely voluntarily” it is surely because they are so committed with the company’s
goals, they find their own objectives so coincident with those of the company, that
they are willing to entirely renounce to have any kind of life outside of it!),
to fire as many employees as needed to protect the bottom line (as long as they
are the ones contributing less to the results, all is well! A meritocracy is a
meritocracy, and keeping those able to produce more at the margins, remember,
is the only way to maximize everybody’s utility) and, in general, to champion a
consumerist lifestyle that impoverishes all of us and brainwashes its employees
in an endless race of sumptuary consumption (a.k.a. “keeping up with the
Joneses”, a.k.a. “the rat race” where even if you win… you are still a rat!).
Which means that a) none of the
studies I’ve seen really tell me anything meaningful about the really ethical
behavior of the companies considered, just showed how much they were willing to
spend on window dressing; and b) the correlation they show between that window
dressing and the results are flimsy at best, and most fleeting (it’s funny but
disheartening to see how prominently tech companies that end up being a flash
in the pan figure in those studies… looks like the advantage given by appearing
to act virtuously is not long-lasting). But of course, using a specious
argument can only take you so far.
The premise most Business Ethics
texts start with reminds me strongly of the one used by “evolutionary-psychologists-turned-ethicists”.
In that case, we heard how so-and-so-behavior is “good”, or is justified (and
thus can be endorsed, prescribed, rooted for or whatnot) because it is “natural”
for us, it has been “selected” (by Darwinian evolution). That was, indeed,
frequently sold in the nineties of last century (and in the aughts of this one)
as the “only” possible rational explanation for all of morality, able at last
to free itself from the shameful shackles of tradition and superstition and
obscurantism. At last we had a good, solid, scientific argument grounding
resolutely “how we should behave” in Nature and Nature’s laws, instead of in
fuzzy metaphysics! Until, of course, you unpacked (not much subtlety was
needed) the lofty rhetoric and found there was not much “there” in there: so
the real justification for me choosing behavior A over behavior B nowadays is
because behavior A helped my ancestors in EEA (Environment of Evolutionary
Adaptedness, which psychologists of this persuasion assume was inhabited by
hunter-gatherer tribes in something vaguely similar to the present African Savannah,
only a tad wetter) have more babies? Whoa, that’s some argument! And a pretty lousy one, at that! Because, as moral
reasoning goes, that gives me exactly ZERO
reasons to act one way or another… And, as is only to be expected, the kind of
behaviors such argument would condone are not that morally enticing to begin
with (from killing the offspring your current couple may have had with a
previous partner to cheating your current one in favor of someone with a better
genetic endowment).
It is not surprising that the kind
of behaviors a Business Ethics that thinks the only justification to behave
ethically in the first place is because it helps the company make more money
are not that enticing either: treat your employees as badly as you can get away
with! extract from them every last ounce of effort, ‘til they drop dead! (or,
almost as bad, ‘til they denounce your greed in Facebook… at that point you may
start considering giving them a break); extract every ounce of added value from
your suppliers, every penny they lose will be your gain! (but hey! Tell them
you are a win-win partner and you are only after a “fair” negotiating outcome,
so they may not sully your pristine reputation); skimp on quality as much as
needed! barely comply with safety regulations! as “quality” is just a matter of
marketing and product placement and market positioning, and it is subjective
anyways, so better spend a few more bucks on advertising and increasing awareness
in social media than actually pay to make the product (you mean the “physical”
thing? Who cares about such things nowadays!) a iota better or more solid or
more durable in the first place (durability? That sounds too much like “liability”!
Planned obsolescence is all the rage! Who wants customers to hold on to their
thingies for more than a few months? Better entice them to throw them away ASAP
so we can sell new replacements to them!)… But sure, publish a CSR report every
year (in glossy pages! And send copies to everybody with a pair of eyes out
there! What, you say? Those pages come at the expense of a few thousand trees
that had to be felled to produce the paper pulp? Pay, then, to some NGO for the
plantation of a thousand more!) and you have a get-ot-of-jail-free card that
earns you the plaudits and admiration of every self-respecting Business Ethics
scholar this side of the Mississippi.
I can hear my horrified readers
objecting: “no, no, no, that’s just corrosive cynicism, and suicidal, populist
and arrogant-to-boot nihilism! The corporate leaders that commit to behave
ethically, and invest in writing those codes of conduct, and in putting their
wallet where their mouth is, and thus guide their corporations towards acting
as responsible corporate citizens are not, by any measure, the scoundrels and
hypocrites you are depicting! I’m sure they really believe in a better, fairer,
more sustainable world, and strive their utmost to achieve it”. At which point
I can only remind said readers of the beautiful, beautiful bridge connecting
Manhattan with New Jersey that I am willing to sell for a pittance. A real
bargain any which way you look at it. Note that I do not deny some corporate leaders maybe moved by
selfless, generous, high-spirited impulses and truly want to make the world a
better place. What I bluntly say is that as long as they aspire to construct
that better world because it will happen
to (what a lucky coincidence!) make them even richer, we should all be extremely
suspicious and extremely weary of the sincerity of their declared intentions
and of the likely results of their initiatives. Because with that justification
such initiatives will amount to little more than window dressing, and the
real-world effect of them is likely to be more deleterious than beneficial.
Thus, if we really want to research,
and some distant day agree, on a set of rules to make corporations behave more
ethically, in a more beneficial way (beneficial, that is, to the whole of
society, and not only to its shareholders and executives) we necessarily have
to start by ditching the poisonous canard that “they have to behave well
because that will make them earn more benefits”. They have to behave well, in
the first place, because we as a society have put in place an effective
compliance mechanism (laws and courts to ensure they are applied) that will
land them in jail if they don’t. And in the second place, because the kind of
life they will lead if they don’t comply, even if they are never caught, is a
second-rate life, a life that nobody finds admirable, or enticing, or worthy of
emulation. But for that second argument to have bite we need to restore a
minimum of social agreement about what constitutes a “life well lived” that we
are far now from achieving… Which takes me to my next point
5.
Lack
of commitment to any kind of “substantive” values
Look, I get that we don’t live in
good times for value appreciation. Samuel Biagetti said it before myself (The IKEA humans), although he lacks a bigger
framework to explain how the Enlightenment, freeing and emancipating as it was,
could not but corrode the tradition and shared narratives of the citizens under
its sway, and that the logical conclusion of such corrosion could only be the
anomic hikikomoris that now populate the West (and the East, and the North and
the South), valueless, having in common only a reverential respect for “everyone
doing his or her own thing” and universally unable to judge if such thing is
good or bad (so old-fashioned! Good or bad for whom, or according to what shared
norms?) But who are we to blame the Enlightenment? I for one considered myself
a loyal foot soldier of the Enlightenment until not long ago… the Enlightenment,
in turn, was but the necessary consequence of the collapse of Christianity
(maybe Judeo-Christianity) in the XVI century under the weight of its own
contradictions, expressed in genocidal wars of unimaginable cruelty immediately
after the Reformation’s schism. All we can do at this point is certify the
depth of the crisis, and live with the consequences.
But that doesn’t mean we have to
take a page from the sceptics’ catechism and accept that all values are
arbitrary constructions, built to hide and justify the equally arbitrary
domination of the few over the many. Call me an absolutist (I’ve been called
worse things), but I still believe there are such thing as the ultimate,
indisputable good, the ultimate, indisputable true and the ultimate, indisputable
beautiful, and that such concepts have objective reality, even if there is
nobody who believes in them or who can appreciate their existence. For complex
and convoluted reasons (spelled out in these wordy and contorted posts, long
even for my stretched standards: What to believe I, What to believe II and What to believe III) I think there are valuable things,
and ideas, and states of affairs. That it makes sense to find out what those
things and ideas and states of affairs are, and that when we value something,
we have real, undefeatable reasons to bring that something about (or to sustain
and maintain that something already in existence, whatever the case may be).
However, I recognize that this is a
very minority position nowadays. If you accept, as the majority of public
opinion seems to do, that we live in an exclusively material universe, with no
real consciousness, with no free will, where things simply happen in succession
following unyielding laws, regardless of who thinks what of them, where history
(biological evolution included) is just “one damn thing after another” with no
real rhyme or reason, I can understand you don’t feel much inclined to appeal
to any purported “value” as justification of your behavior (or of anybody else’s).
What does such appeal add, as an explanation, to the enumeration of the natural
laws that caused such behavior in the first place? In a deterministic universe
things like will, or voluntary action, or agency, do not really have much
purchase. And nothing, really, can be called valuable. We may enjoy a bit more
or a bit less. We may suffer ourselves, or make others suffer, a bit more or a
bit less. It really is all the same, as we will all die and the universe will
go on unfolding exactly like if we had never been here in the first place. Even
if we were to “cause” some cataclysmic event, it would be but an illusion to
think we played a “role” in any meaningful sense, as we were just the puppets
of a blind fate that had determined how we would act and react long before we
came to the scene.
So Ethics textbooks, written by
well-intentioned authors that have been mostly raised in such an intellectual
milieu, are understandably wary of appealing to values, or mentioning them at
all. Is it good or bad that some powerful executive berates his underlings and makes
everybody around him feel bad? I have not found many cases discussing that
all-too-frequent situation (maybe the authors I surveyed didn’t consider it a
Business Ethics question to begin with, assuming it had more to do with “leadership”
or “human resources management”), but from a valueless perspective the only
claim that could be levied against the bullying boss behavior is that it
somehow fails to extract the last drop of productivity from his employees, as
treating them more kindly would surely make them produce more, through enhanced
“motivation” and “engagement” and “commitment” and similar bullshit and claptrap…
I hope I make it evident enough that such line of reasoning really enrages me
and makes me almost want to shout “No! the reason to treat people decently is
empathically NOT because you can exploit them better being nice! It is because
people have something beyond their salary (their price) to be balanced against
the value they add to the production process! They have DIGNITY, dammit!!!!”
and, as Kant famously said, dignity is non-negotiable. You cannot exchange dignity
for anything, and it demands absolutely and in any situation a modicum of
respect and recognition. Respect and recognition that I have failed to find in
all the Business Ethics texts I’ve perused, no matter how hard I’ve looked for
them.
That’s also why, only in Business
Ethics textbooks, you find so peculiar a concept as “normative ethics”, something
supposedly in opposition to “descriptive ethics”. The former is typically
glossed over, and few pages are devoted to it (in the most cursory manner,
along the lines of “some people at some points in history have maintained that
really some behaviors were better than others, maybe because of their
consequences, maybe because of the intention with which they were approached, maybe
because of the type of character they fostered), but those people never really
reached any kind of agreement, and the language they used is really confusing
and obscure and dense, so we don’t need to concern us much with ‘em”. The
second is given more consideration, dealing with how “ethical” decisions are
made, and how “ethical” choices are arrived at. But of course, a “descriptive
ethics” has as much to do with practical philosophy (or with plain ol’ reason)
as a “normative physics” would have. How would you feel reading in a physics
book something along the lines of: “it’s a pity the electrons are negatively
charged, because negative really has the connotation that it is bad they are
so, and indeed, the universe would be a better place if electrons were as
positively charged as protons, as we would get rid of all that suspicious
attractions (and what is it with that heteronormative tyrannical imposition of
particles of opposite charge attracting one another, whilst those of the same
charge repel each other? It would certainly be much better if each individual
particle could choose who to feel attracted to and who to feel repelled by!)”?
You may be amused by the implausible nonsense, but certainly your understanding
of physics wouldn’t be much enhanced.
Similarly, your understanding of
Ethics, Business or otherwise, won’t be much enhanced by reading 99% of the
books of the subject, precisely because they avoid any substantive discussion
of normativity (what is it that we have reasons to do, what states of the world
should we actively promote, and which ones should we actively oppose, and what
is the nature of that “should” and those reasons) focusing instead in an
accumulation of “cases” or “practical applications” that, as I said in other
place, are as “ready to be applied as sure to be forgotten or circumvented”.
Which in turn explains why they have to focus on what I mentioned as my final
gripe…
6.
Excessive
emphasis on recent articles
The vast majority of the “traditional”
ethical treatises presuppose some values, and a shared understanding of what
constitutes a reason. So they grate any modern economist’s sensibility,
nurtured in a valueless world where people are just a particular kind of “resource”
(and, like any other resource, has a marginal cost and a marginal contribution
to benefits, and that is all there is about it). So, as we mentioned in point
number 3, all the pre-existing ethical tradition can be glibly disregarded.
Which suits the authors fine, because they have not been trained (not
noticeably, to be sure, and looking at their CVs it is clear why) in the
humanities, or in philosophy, and they probably find the texts that expound
that tradition wholly alien, obscure, uninteresting, abstruse, ambiguous,
abstract and impractical. Not a single equation or graph, not a single
statement that can be empirically validated or falsated (although you look at
what trained economist consider an “experiment”, normally involving a couple
dozen highly unrepresentative students, and what they consider “empirical
validation” of a model and you cannot avoid smiling condescendingly)…
Furthermore, again as I have stated
in another forum, Business Ethics was born as a distinct and promising new
academic discipline in the tumultuous years of the 70’s of the last century.
They probably attempted to enroll some moral philosophy professor or other, but
they were to wooly-headed, too accustomed to the rarefied air of the ivory
towers of academia (and too ignorant of the humbler realities of corporate
life) to say anything that was of much use for the hard-nosed world of the
capitalist, competitive, dynamic firm in which the hapless students would have
to develop their professional lives. So the discipline was assigned to teachers
with backgrounds in psychology, sociology, economics and BA, that had no
patience at all for Aristotle and the like. And so it has remained, paying lip
service to “ethics” by quoting some Cliffs Notes version of some tradition or
other (digested so a fourth grader could understand it) and then inundating
their texts with more recent papers, in the traditional dynamic of “I scratch
your back so you will in turn scratch mine” that has become ubiquitous and a
fixed part of the landscape of an academic career. Papers that may enhance
their intellectual bona fides in the eyes of their colleagues but that are, I’m
sorry to say, of absolutely no value whatsoever either to students or to
society in general.
But the sorry state of university
professors’ writing, and how it has contributed to the current state of
technological stagnation, would merit certainly a post of its own…
