Three Dimensional Ethics

Implementing Workplace Values

Attracta Lagan, Brian Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780975742235
• eBook ISBN: 9781317325024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Ethics is not just about morality; it is a complex dimension of personal and corporate life that can lead to higher performance by both business and society. Customers, employees and business partners seek predictable corporate behaviour that is aligned with stated personal, workplace and democratic values. Ethics training can help to achieve this.

This business ethics primer is a valuable tool for raising ethical awareness in your organisation. Reflecting on employees' personal values and world views, it then examines their impact on the development and application of your organisation's mission, vision and values and finally, your organisation's impact on the societies and environment in which it operates.

Three Dimensional Ethics: Implementing Workplace Values

concludes with a unique chapter on ethics and doing business in China, illuminating roles in corporate stakeholder responsibility that align with principles in the Confucian Analects.

Lagan and Moran provide a practical perspective on business ethics training that is lively, relevant and useful with insights into managing corporate values such as:

Ethical frameworks

Ladder of escalation options

Ethical dilemmas

Ethical decision making models

Ethics audits

Codes of ethics and Codes of conduct

Vision and values models

Stakeholder commitment steps

Governance checklists

Addressing values gaps

Knowing your values

The four virtues

Stages of moral development

Reflection and action

Training tools include Australian and global case studies, definitions, tips, snapshots of ethical approaches, models, quotes, checklists, discussion panels, workshops, scenarios and exercises.

Chapter 1
WHO DECIDES WHAT IS ETHICAL?

SOCIETY, ORGANISATIONS OR INDIVIDUALS?

Ethics is about character and courage. How we meet the challenge when doing the right thing will cost more than we want to pay.

Robert D. Hass
CEO Levi Strauss & Co.

Ethics, morals and the law

Changing expectations of behaviour in society and business

Until perhaps only 15 years ago, business existed comfortably outside of civil society. Politicians, business people and scientists lived in peaceful co-existence, each observing the sovereignty of their separate states. The rest of society understood their dependence on business for employment, taxes and the contribution to the economies of developed and developing countries that business provided. Like the complex ecosystem that thrives under our oceans, the little fish lived off the big fish, but the big fish in turn ate the little fish while the myriad of other species made sure they kept out of the way of the large predators, eking out an existence for themselves.

All of that changed at around the time of the first Earth Summit in 1992, where what had been evolving over the previous 10 years was given a name – sustainable development – and this subsequently became a movement which evolved to embrace corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship. Inexorably, the social nature of business’ role became apparent and the growing voice of consumer discontent about corporate irresponsibility and greed turned to an audible roar. There is a belief in the field of social change that people only become concerned about change when it is deemed to have an immediate and direct effect on their lives. What we have seen in the last 20 years, with the rise of environmentalism coupled with the growth of consumer militancy, is a suspension of that belief and the emergence of a worldwide psyche (zeitgeist) that is prepared to support just agents for change, no matter how distant the cause from the lives of those supporting it. Consider the growth in size and power of NGO (non-government organisations) and not-for-profit (NFP) sectors over the last 50 years. Notwithstanding the fact that governments around the world have withdrawn from many public services now provided by NFPs, NFPs in fact are fast becoming the public face and voice of civil society.

Membership of 7 major environmental groups in the US grew from 5.3 million to 9.5 million between 1980 and 1990, while in the social sector, NFPs in 22 countries employed 19 million full-time paid employees. In France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, 1.2 million full-time volunteers worked for international NGOs. In Barricades and Boardrooms: A Contemporary History of the Corporate Accountability Movement, Jem Bendell found that of the 13,000 international NGOs identified in year 2000, around one-quarter had been created since 1990 (paper 13, UNRISD 2000–2005 project Business Responsibility for Sustainable Development ISSN 1020-8216, 2004). According to a recent Business Review Weekly article on the charity sector (Charity Inc., March 24–30, 2005), there are now 700,000 registered charities in Australia turning over more than $70 billion p.a. – almost 10% of the country’s GDP.

Potently, the NGO sector enjoys the highest trust ratings by the public and the average person in the street is more likely to believe an NGO representative than today’s government minister or business leader.

In the same period, public scrutiny turned towards business as many people woke up to the frightening power of the corporation, while activist organisations such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and Corporate Watch turned the spotlight on corporate corpulence. The legal sector increased penalties for misconduct and reached behind the corporate veil to prosecute directors for dereliction of their fiduciary and social duties. In the United States, Federal Sentencing Guidelines were enacted giving regulators powers to prosecute unethical corporate acts. In Europe, codification of the EU treaties into a draft constitution put business on notice that it could no longer stand outside the gates of civil society while enjoying the benefits it derived from that society. Today, ethics in business like ethics outside business, means accepting the accountabilities that arise from all relationships and interrelationships spawned by business activities. It means that business is done in responsible ways so that business promotes human good. This goes much further than business ethics did in the past. It extends beyond the organisation’s walls or factory gates to encompass every aspect of its global footprint – and the complete range of stakeholders with whom it impacts in direct and indirect ways – such as:

• its employees – how they go about business and their working conditions in other countries;
• supply chains – an organisation’s local and international supply chain relationships and their social and environmental impacts;
• damages – accountability for the potential negative impacts of company products on customers, their families and communities – such as the food industry’s contribution to the epidemic of obesity in the West; or the social cost of addiction to alcohol, gambling or cigarette products;
• human rights – abuses associated with fair trade, globalisation and prices paid in developing countries where raw materials are sourced or products are manufactured;
• corporate lobbying – activities threatening the integrity of the marketplace and political stability that can distort free and fair participation in global business transactions;
• human interdependencies – where corporations can use their power in collaboration with others, to address the world’s intractable problems including global climate change, global poverty, the promotion of global human rights and issues of intergenerational equity, and to account for them.

What is business ethics?

Finding a simple definition of business ethics can be like diving for pearls in a sea of porridge. A useable definition is more than just a convenient coupling of words into a phrase that displays lots of intent but does not signify any intent to act. As Paul Tillich famously said:

‘Ethics is not a subject, it’s a life put to the test in a thousand daily moments.’

(Paul Tillich: An Appraisal, by J. Heywood Thomas; Westminster, 1963)

Often people use the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ interchangeably; they are not the same thing. Ethics is a much larger area of study that includes the study of morality and standards of a society, and how people decide what is right and wrong. Ethics is about considering possible actions and therefore possible consequences, while morality is about behaving according to a set of pre-agreed rules.

Ethics refers to the debate, while morality describes how judgements are made.

Ethical versus moral perspectives

Is it fair to cause suffering to animals? Do they have innate rights? Is it fair to use animals in medical research? Is it fair to use them for cosmetic testing? What is the difference? These are typical of the questions which comprise the ethical debate on the nature of our relationships with animals. Depending on the moral framework chosen, people will respond quite differently. For example, from a utilitarian or consequential moral framework, you might decide that by using animals in medical trails you are potentially saving the lives of humans; therefore that sacrifice may be worth it. However, if you use a moral framework that promotes an animal rights perspective, you might disagree and defend your conclusion by arguing that animals too have inalienable rights to be protected from unnecessary harm. If you come from a Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu or Islamic tradition your conclusions and answers might be different again to those influenced by Judeo-Christian backgrounds.

Ethics seeks to evaluate the moral standards used by different societies, or within a society at a certain point of time, how these standards are arrived at and then justified. We engage in ethical debate when we evaluate our socialised moral standards and compare them with decision-making frameworks of others, such as Buddhism, Islam, Taoism or Judaism. Business ethics evaluates the behavioural standards promoted by organisations internally with corporate culture and employee relations, and externally in their influences on marketplace dynamics, host societies and increasingly, the natural environment.

The main ethical frameworks we use are still those that we have inherited from ancient philosophers. These obviously pre-date the development and expansion of the modern corporation and business struggles to adapt them to 21st Century behaviour, decision making, strategies and commercial activities. Ethics is complex and probably always will be. While many attempt to make ethics universal and objective, a wide range of different beliefs obviously remains about how we should behave towards each other, as well as how others should behave towards us. There is no clear agreement on what constitutes ethical behaviour in a business context; however there is increasing pressure to develop and promote a modern-day model of shared understanding and commitment to ethical business practices.

Moral frameworks

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that there are certain moral rights and duties that all human beings possess and that requires that everyone be treated as a free person equal to everyone else. Kant referred to this moral principle as the categorical imperative, that is, everyone has a moral right to such treatment, and everyone has the correlative duty to treat others in this way.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) were the two most notable advocates for the utilitarian principle. This principle focuses on the consequences of actions and morally good actions are seen as those that promote the best consequence for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism holds that the right action is the action whose net benefits are greatest by comparison to the net benefits of all other possible alternatives

Aristotle (384 –322 BC) argued that what distinguishes humans from all other creatures is the ability to reason, and so the distinguishing purpose of human beings is to exercise reason in all actions. The moral action here revolves around identifying actions that will satisfy the dictates of individual conscience. Corporate whistleblowers who expose illegal and unethical activities are often found to have acted on their conscience.

Carol Gilligan (1936–present) has highlighted how many females, as well as sensitive males, can make decisions based on their feelings and in consideration of what they perceive to be the needs of others – so that ethical decisions are made in a relationship context rather than independently (In a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Gilligan suggests that women have been socialised into a sense of responsibility and compassion that can lead them to make decisions about what is right and wrong from a care perspective, both in caring for oneself and others. This results in a different way of being in the world. In the female world, individuals and organisations are no longer seen as autonomous and independent of each other but are interdependent and this interdependence brings responsibilities and accountabilities to each other. From this perspective, partiality should be shown to those close to us or those in need and an ethic of care; caring for people underpins how moral decisions get made. This can be contrasted with an impersonal impartial approach, for example, of utilitarianism.

For most of us at work, there is insufficient time to calibrate the various schools of philosophical thought that have contributed to these different ethical perspectives. Practical and easily understood concepts are being sought that can be applied in day-to-day situations. We provide some concepts here, with the caveat that these approaches and definitions cannot be absolute – what might be seen as acceptable business practice today may change with changing societal values to become unethical business practice tomorrow. The appreciation and understanding of evolving societal values, and their impact on business, will continue to shape and define priorities in the business ethics debate. There are no absolute truths or eternal answers – only processes for creating the human conversations that precede any descriptions of what it is to be ethical. That is why we believe that

the most insightful and accurate definition of management is that it is essentially about the ‘management of meaning’.

The role of manager as facilitator is nowhere more vital than in facilitating conversations about how ethical challenges can be met, and how the organisation can act in accordance with the values and principles it states, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Contents
• Introduction The examined life
• CHAPTER 1 Who decides what is ethical?
• CHAPTER 2 Changing societal values
• CHAPTER 3 Governance, corporate social responsibility and employee accountability
• CHAPTER 4 Context, challenge and choice
• CHAPTER 5 Understanding ethical perspectives
• CHAPTER 6 Becoming comfortable with the ethical dimension
• CHAPTER 7 Virtue ethics and the rise of the meaning economy
• CHAPTER 8 Ethics and doing business in China
• Epilogue Intergenerational equity
• Appendix 1 The Global 100 List
• Appendix 2 The ANZ Top 120
• Appendix 3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Useful websites
• Further reading