Why Is Business Antithetical to Ethics?
In law school, I studied professional responsibility and jurisprudence (philosophy of law), but those classes were just side notes to the main subjects: contracts, torts, property, constitutional law, criminal law, evidence, and civil procedure. At the time I was more interested in the how rather than the why of law. I had exams to take and interviews to prepare for. I wasn’t yet contemplating the long-term implications of my actions.
As an intern long ago at a large international law firm, I sat in on a mediation over a conflict created by an attorney seeking to help his “client” (i.e., girlfriend) benefit financially from a “mistake” he’d made decades earlier in a land sale contract he’d drawn up for her parents to sell a lot to a retired couple. The attorney and his girlfriend were seeking an inordinate amount of money from a retired couple for a few feet of land the couple believed — for good reason — had been included when they purchased the lot. At the end of the mediation, the couple walked away with an additional $18,000 because no one really knew how things would turn out in court.
What bothered me most was that no one in the law firm wanted to talk about the deeper moral implications. It was what it was, and then we all had lunch. That’s probably the moment my commitment to a career in corporate law began to diminish and one of the reasons I abandoned law for academia where I can ponder and talk about these things till the cows come home.
As a marketing and management professor, I teach a course in business ethics where I challenge students to embark on deep self-reflection before judging the ethics of others, including business leaders they may someday work for.
Statistically, business practitioners are perceived as being among the lowest of the low when it comes to ethical awareness and standards — even lower than attorneys, believe it or not (politicians are still lower). It’s regrettable that two professions — business and law — with such tremendous potential to add value to society are perceived as being morally bankrupt.
Is it just because business attracts those kinds of individuals? Are business students predisposed or educated to make a profit at all costs without considering the deeper moral implications, except as side notes? How early is too early to consider ethical questions — and how late is too late?
One of my business ethics students wrote at the end of an exam essay, “I’m 20 years old. Did you really think you could change my mind about anything?”
It is never my intent to change minds. I do invite students to consider bigger pictures than their own bottom line.
Not all of my students are that jaded, although as junior and senior business majors they’ve already made up their minds about a lot of things. They’ve absorbed and inherited assumptions about business and life that they’ve never closely examined. They’ve never followed those assumptions through to their logical and often terrifying implications.
I introduce many of them for the first time to the idea that business can and should be done ethically and responsibly as well as profitably. I trust that at least some of my students will take higher roads and change their corners of the business world.
_____
Thanks for reading!
Follow me here on Medium or connect with me on LinkedIn for more about life and business.
