I’ve spent some time over the past 3 months discussing the concepts of Morality and Ethics. I took a course in Moral Philosophy this summer, and I’m taking Business Ethics right now.
In the first seminar of the Business Ethics series, the professor introduced us to his definitions of Morality and Ethics, which would form the basis of his discussions. While I disagree with the definitions, for the sake of argument I will accept them to see where it leads. First, the definitions:
Morality - one’s internal belief structure of what is good and true
Ethics - the core values defined by a community of what is good and true
You can probably see the problem already. What is ethical is whatever the community (either as a whole or just a majority) believes is right. The guys at Enron were ethical because they were doing exactly what their community (Enron) believed was right. To determine if they were moral, one must look to see if there was an internal conflict between what he did because of Ethics, and what he wanted to do because of his Morals.
You can counter this with the notion that the Enron community didn’t align with the larger community (our society), and that our society is where Ethics are truly derived. But this is wrong - by deriving Ethics from a community and not from universal truths, you recognize that there are multiple communities with differing ethics. Because Ethics are derived from that community, members from one community can’t say the Ethics of another community are wrong.
This leads us to one of the biggest problems in modern philosophy today - the concept of relativism. I won’t go deep into the philosophy behind it, but basically if you follow this line of thinking to its end, you reach a point where you find a community that represents any possible combination of Ethics. I can murder people as long as I associate with a community that believes murder is right.
The existence of a practice does not entail its being ethical. We must use our intuition to determine if it is truly right.
Is whistleblowing right or wrong? According to this definition of Ethics, it is always wrong because it always is in disagreement with the core values of a business (whether those be lieing, cheating, stealing…). In my mind, this fails the Intuition Test.
Which leads me to my argument: We shouldn’t be taught “Business Ethics” if Ethics is defined as principles which the business as a whole says is right. We should be taught “Business Morality” in order to question the norms in a business to ensure they truly are right.
