For Business Ethics

Campbell Jones, Martin Parker, Rene ten Bos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134386291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

For Business Ethics is a daring adventure into the world of business ethics. It offers a clear and accessible introduction to business ethics and also expands business ethics beyond its current narrow confines. It is ground-breaking in the sense that it invites a distinctively critical approach to business ethics, an approach that the authors argue is part and parcel of ethics.

With a thought-provoking glossary and recommendations for further readings, For Business Ethics is an essential purchase for students and practitioners alike. It is at once an introduction to business ethics and a challenge to anyone who wishes to take part in or change contemporary organized society.

Chapter 1

Introduction: against business ethics

THIS STRANGE BOOK

Before you read this book you should be aware of two things. First of all we, the authors, don’t like textbooks. Most of the textbooks that we have ever read have been too long, rather dull, and full of abstract examples and even more abstract theories. But most importantly, they don’t do anything interesting and relevant. They try to tell the student everything about a subject, and almost always end up saying not very much. They are little more than lists and tables, and often there isn’t much in those lists or tables. You can memorise the list for an exam, of course, but we wonder what you actually learn from that kind of book. It seems to us that this is what most business ethics textbooks are like.

We should also make a second, and perhaps more worrying, admission. To be quite honest, we are not particularly fond of ‘business ethics’. Most of what we read under the name business ethics is either sentimental common sense, or a set of excuses for being unpleasant. Some of business ethics is easy talk and simple rules – ‘nice people do nice things, nasty people do nasty things’. The rest of it is a laughably transparent attempt to make things look a whole lot better than they actually are. For us, and hopefully soon also for you, business ethics in its present form is at best window dressing and at worst a calculated lie.

Given that we don’t like textbooks or business ethics you might wonder why we would think of sitting down and writing a textbook on business ethics. Even more improbable, a business ethics textbook with a title like For Business Ethics. But, despite appearances, we want to argue that it is not us, but the world we live in that is strange. Further, we think that most of the knowledge that is produced by academics and consultants and appears in business ethics textbooks is also strange. So, one of our goals is to invite you into this world of strangeness. To put it another way, we propose one of the things that has always been the demand of critical thought – to think about things, to look at alternative perspectives, and in the end to make the world that we are familiar with look a little bit more strange than it usually does. In other words, to expose the ‘common sense’ of business ethics as neither common nor sensible.

Because of this, we are going to ask a bit more of you as a reader than is often asked in textbooks. Specifically, we are going to ask you to read the whole of the book from start to end, even if you find some parts of it confusing and some bits hard. We have tried to write as simply and straightforwardly as we can, and we hope that things will come across reasonably clearly. We have also prepared a glossary that provides discussions of most of the key terms that we mention throughout the book. But no matter how hard we try, we are aware that reading this book is not going to be an easy experience. We hope that you will eventually agree that this is not because we are intentionally troublesome sorts, but because business ethics and the world that produces it are, to put it bluntly, in a miserable state.

In the classic definition that we inherit from the ancient Greeks, ethics is a question of the meaning of ‘the good life’. When understood in this way, ethics asks questions about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We want to argue that very often business ethics has given easy and self-interested answers to such really big questions. So one of the things that we will need to do is to slow ‘business’ and ‘ethics’ down, to slow down your reading and thinking, and to interrupt some of the ideas about ‘business ethics’ that you might have already acquired. Because whether you have taken a course in business ethics before or not, you will still have some idea about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in business. That is unavoidable. But as you read this book we will ask you to examine these ideas again, and that process may be uncomfortable. You may well want to dismiss our ideas without further thought.

But, uncomfortable as it may be, we want you to enjoy a certain discomfort, or at least to begin with, to understand it. That discomfort is part of a training that involves considering different understandings of what is good and bad. Similar discomfort was keenly felt by Socrates about two and a half thousand years ago when he called on his community to think about ethics. It was also felt by those that put him to death for asking such irritatingly difficult questions. We should recall the suggestion that Socrates made to his fellows, on being sentenced to death: ‘to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living’ (Plato, 1954: 71–72). In this book we want to propose that the discipline of business ethics is rarely subjected to that examination, but that it would be worthwhile. Indeed, without that sort of examination, we would go so far as suggesting that ‘business ethics’ is not interested in ethics at all.

AGAINST BUSINESS ETHICS

What, then, is the problem with business ethics? One way of expressing it would be to say something like the following. It is simply a matter of getting let down. Business ethics holds a great promise, in that it promises ethics and speaks of justice. But at the same time it seems compromised to its very core, and seems to resist the very thing that it advances (Jones, 2003a: 241; see also Parker, 2002a: 92–93). Part of the problem, then, is that business ethics promises far more than it delivers. And this delivery problem is due to the way that business ethics has taken what we would call a narrow or restricted version of business and ethics. While business ethics claims to be open and critical, we feel it to be narrow and uncritical. So in this book we will do our best to outline an argument for a broadened or expanded business ethics. Which is perhaps doing little more than taking business ethics seriously, more seriously than it takes itself.

In this opening chapter we will try to outline the problems that we have with business ethics, which is a way of pointing out how business ethics fails to take itself seriously. Very simply, we have six problems with the discipline of business ethics. Each of these problems relates to a ‘foreclosure’, by which we mean that something has been closed down before it should have been. Premature responses to questions look like answers, but if we take these answers for granted then we no longer think about the questions. Against these foreclosures, our own view is that ethics is an opening and not a closure, and hence all of these foreclosures represent serious problems.

FIRST PROBLEM: FORECLOSING PHILOSOPHY

Our first problem with business ethics relates to the way that business ethicists do philosophy. Business ethics is that part of business education that makes the most explicit claim to be interested in philosophy. But if we look at the philosophy that is done in business ethics, it seems clear that twentieth century philosophy is almost completely excluded. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book we will look at the three streams of ethical thinking that have dominated business ethics. We find that one originates from the ancient Greeks, one from a late eighteenth century German and another from two eighteenth and nineteenth century Englishmen. Despite the fact that ethics has been hotly debated in philosophy throughout the twentieth century and has been one of the major sources of philosophical reflection up to the close of the millennium, the discipline of business ethics has insulated itself from these developments, either ignoring them altogether or misrepresenting them so that it looks as if twentieth century philosophy has nothing interesting to say about ethics. For this reason, we and others have been arguing that recent philosophers actually have a lot to say about business ethics (see, for example, Borgerson, 2004; Freeman and Phillips, 1999; Jones, 2003a; 2003b; Parker, 2003a; 2003b; Roberts, 2001; 2003; Rosenthal and Bucholz, 1999; ten Bos, 2002; 2003; Wicks and Freeman, 1998; Wray-Bliss, 2002; 2003).

In this book we propose to extend the challenge to the foreclosure of philosophy that we generally find in business ethics. The first way that we do this is by rereading business ethics in the light of developments in contemporary thought. This is one of the tasks of the first half of the book. The other way that we contest the foreclosure of business ethics is by turning to sources that have been pretty much ignored in the development of business ethics, and this is the major task of the second half of the book. Hence part of our expanded conception of business ethics will be based on, first, a broadened reading of traditional ethical theory and, second, a broadened canon of ethical theory. We propose to bring philosophy back into business ethics, but perhaps a better way of thinking about this is that we are simply taking the philosophical claims of business ethics seriously. That is to say, we all know that business ethics poses questions of ethics, and ethical questions are an important part of philosophy. So whilst business ethics has often said it is philosophically informed, in this book we propose to take it at its word.

SECOND PROBLEM: FORECLOSING SOCIETY

The second major problem that we have with business ethics is its individualism. Individualistic explanations of social action focus exclusively, or largely, on the characteristics of individuals, and ignore or downplay the role of social context. This is like trying to explain something about a person without referring to the situations that have shaped them in ways that are common to other people – gender, ethnicity, class, age and so on. The most common way that individualism manifests itself in business ethics is when corporate scandals or other obvious wrongdoing are attributed purely to the evil or selfish character of individuals. Often it is tempting, when we see gross corporate misconduct, to explain this by pointing the finger at the person who did the wrong act. But we want to argue that individualism itself can also be a problem, particularly when it hides from view the context in which acts of misconduct take place.

When we say that we want to challenge the individualism of business ethics, we are not saying that individuals never do bad things, and we certainly think that we, as individuals, have a responsibility for our acts. But we want to stress that individual action always takes place in a social context. Another way of putting this is that individual action always takes place in relation to social structures, like organisations or economies, to mention just two obvious examples. This is not to say that structures entirely cause or determine individual actions, but rather to note that social action is always social, always taking place when an individual produces and is produced by a social context. We will discuss this problem in more detail in Chapter 5, when we examine the place of character and community in ethical explanation. But for now it is enough to be clear that individualism is one of the problems that we have with business ethics.

This means that, although you are obviously an individual reading this book, we will invite you throughout to think both about yourself and your social context, and when you assess the ethics of others, we invite you to consider them in their context. Sometimes we need to criticise the actions of individuals. That is clear. But sometimes we also need to criticise social structures and arrangements, and to see the way that those structures influence action, making some types of action possible and others impossible. If we want to explain the scandals associated with business, it is important that we see both the individuals responsible for certain choices and the context in which their actions took place. To put it simply, people are often encouraged to behave in ways that others might later decide are immoral. We want to understand more about how people are encouraged to behave in these ways, and hence judge structures, as well as the people. We therefore will directly discuss organisational and economic structures in Chapters 7 and 8.

THIRD PROBLEM: FORECLOSING ‘THE ETHICAL’

In addition to philosophical foreclosure and individualism, business ethics far too often rests on a very narrow definition of what counts as ‘the ethical’. Some aspects of business obviously present ethical dilemmas. Most people would agree that matters such as bribery, pollution and child labour raise ethical issues. And business ethicists do indeed debate the rights and wrongs of these ‘ethical issues’. But by designating certain things as ‘ethical’ issues, what often then happens is that other things are treated, either explicitly or implicitly, as if they did not involve ethical questions. As a result, business ethics has treated many of the day to day practices of contemporary organised life as if they do not present ethical concerns. Hence, a range of issues, even including basic things such as the employment contract, are treated as if they are not of concern for business ethics. For example, it is generally assumed that once you have a university qualification you will spend most of the rest of your life working for wages within an organisation. Yet, as a television comedy like The Office illustrates, many people find the 9 to 5 routines of work to be anything but satisfying and meaningful. Perhaps it is work itself that is a problem? Business ethics, most of the time, claims to be about good and bad within business. This is all very well, but it does not exhaust the range of matters that concern people about the role of businesses in the contemporary world.

To contest this narrowing, throughout the book we raise ethical problems with a number of things which are considered business as usual. For example, when a company with shareholders gives some of the profits it has made to investors who have not been involved in producing the value, this is seen as a reward for risk. But why should the surplus generated by workers be given to someone else who almost certainly already has a lot of money in the first place? Or think about some other examples. Why do poor nations have to export food when their own populations are starving? Why are third world workers paid so little to make things that are sold for huge profits in the first world? We suggest that the ways that we live and the choices that we make involve major ethical decisions, even if these concerns are largely ignored by the business ethics literature. Indeed, the narrowness of business ethics suggests something quite sinister about the ethics of the business ethics literature. Why are certain topics considered to be common sense? What is it that business ethics is leaving in the shadows?

FOURTH PROBLEM: FORECLOSING THE MEANING OF ‘ETHICS’

Related to the narrowing of the ethical to a specific set of issues, we face a fourth problem, which is one about the meaning of ‘ethics’. Quite often business ethics texts will provide a ‘definition’ of business ethics, that tells us what business ethics is supposed to mean. The problem with this is that business ethics means quite a lot of quite different things. In fact, one of the major problems when we start looking at business ethics is that words like ethics do not have a transparent meaning. Indeed, if we all agreed what ‘ethics’ was, we would not need to argue about it quite so much. In the first half of this book we will look at a range of different meanings of business ethics, particularly looking at the meanings of business ethics in common sense and popular discourse (Chapter 2), and in the philosophies of utilitarianism (Chapter 3), deontology (Chapter 4) and virtue ethics (Chapter 5). As we look at these different ways of thinking about ethics we will find that the differences are not just a matter of talking about the same thing in different ways. Rather, these different ways of talking about ethics seem to be talking about different things, about different ways of imagining ethics itself.

In Chapter 6, we therefore turn directly to the question of the meaning of ethics. In that chapter we suggest that, if we are to understand talk about ethics, we need to understand the captivating and charming nature of the idea of ethics, but we also need to see beyond this to think critically about the meaning of ethics. We therefore strip ethics back to its most basic element, which is something about a relationship with other people and with difference more generally. From this we set out towards the task in the rest of this book, which is to contribute to introducing a new language for thinking and talking about business ethics.

FIFTH PROBLEM: FORECLOSING POLITICS

The fifth problem with business ethics is the way that it tends to deny the role of politics. This is partly related to the third problem we mentioned above, of narrowing ‘the ethical’. But it goes further than this, and relates to a basic question of what business ethics is willing to question and challenge. More often than not, business ethics is assumed to be something that does not really trouble basic assumptions about the normal practices of business. Even when we see a crisis such as the collapse of Enron and the complicity of Arthur Andersen in collecting huge consultancy fees in return for lying about the accounts, business ethics usually does not see this as indicating any basic problems with the operation of corporations in general or of the right of private companies to enforce audit law. Rather, much of business ethics prefers to explain such things as small problems in a wide sea. The point is that very rarely does business ethics even imagine the possibility that the sea may be destroyed or that we might, one day soon, not be able to breath the air in the sky.

In this book we will challenge this foreclosure of politics. We will argue that business ethics could treat scandals such as Enron and Arthur Andersen as a symptom of broader problems in contemporary business practice. Such a move is dangerous, of course, because it unsettles a number of cherished assumptions. It makes us think that the world that we live in might not be the best of all possible worlds. In fact, today, there is a widespread recognition that all is not well in the world, but there seems little will to do anything about this. Perhaps this cynicism is part and parcel of the problem. People who doubt the solutions that are offered for various sorts of problems are often accused of being cynical. But cynicism also involves what has been described as a manifestation of an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ which knows perfectly well what is wrong in the world yet refuses to do anything about it (Sloterdijk, 1988: 5).

In this sense, business ethics, as it is often practised, might itself be an instance of cynicism. Against this, we want you to consider how business ethics might be different from the way it is at the moment. What if we took business ethics seriously? We believe that this is a radical possibility, and one that needs to be considered. To take business ethics seriously will likely set us against much in the world today, and encourage us to consider political alternatives. But because business ethics usually refuses to consider such alternatives, it is often little more than a cynical apology for the status quo. As such, it helps to perpetuate wrongdoings in business rather than understanding or changing them. In doing so, business ethics does not just avoid politics – it assumes a politics that accepts the status quo. It is, we suggest, a bad omen that many of the very same companies that have caused moral outrage about their behaviour have ethical codes and social responsibility statements.

A second task of the second half of the book will therefore be to reconsider the place of politics in business ethics. In Chapter 7 we will look at the role of modern bureaucracy in promoting or denying ethics, and in Chapter 8 we will ask what ethics means in an age of global capital. By asking questions about modernity, bureaucracy, globalisation and capitalism, we are dealing with issues that are sometimes discussed in business ethics texts, though they are much more commonly seen in disciplines like politics and sociology. Business ethics can learn a lot from these disciplines, and it must. These issues threaten to expand, if not explode, business ethics in its narrow form.

SIXTH PROBLEM: FORECLOSING THE GOAL OF ETHICS

This brings us to a tension that we will deal with throughout the book. Business ethics is often caught between two conceptions of what it is for. On the one hand, it can be a reassuring and satisfying set of ideas that reminds us how to do the right thing. On the other hand, it can be something that threatens us by exposing us to difference, and that challenges us to think and act differently. More often than not, business ethics has taken the first path, and in this respect is a source of solutions rather than problems. Business ethics often acts as a technology (see techne) for the reduction of undecidability. It has become something that claims to show us what to do, almost to the extent that we simply need to know the right rules in order to do the right thing. In this way, it has become much the same as described by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, as a form of mathematised and codified knowledge in which thought is removed and ‘which robots can learn and copy’ (1973: 30) – textbook knowledge for puppets, not knowledge that you gain by thinking for yourself.

For us, ethics always involves a certain dislocation from common sense. Ethics shakes you, jolts you out of your complacent acceptance of ‘what is’. This problem has been put differently by different thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas (1974) argues that ethics is not a question of ‘being’ someone, but a question of understanding difference and calling one’s self into question. Jacques Derrida (1995) ar...