Article Contributed by Guy Kingston

It seems that Ethics is a growth industry. There are even advertisements in the newspapers for “professional ethicists”.

Does this mean that we are getting more ethical? Are we at the place of which Plato dreamed, where “kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings”.

Alas, the opposite seems to be true. The fact that so-called “experts” have to be employed to say what is ethical is just one sign that many people are increasingly incapable of telling right from wrong for themselves.

Indeed, the “professional ethicists” are not really concerned with moral right and wrong. Rather they are a junior branch of the legal profession. Many sectors, especially those related to medicine and human services, now have “codes of ethics” or “codes of conduct”. A breach of these codes may have legal consequences. The purpose of the “professional ethicist” is to give a degree of protection from those legal consequences. Surely this is the very opposite of ethics.

The last century has seen an enormous expansion in the scope of the law in most jurisdictions. Activities which were previously left up to individual conscience are now regulated by the state.

This is particularly true of business.

Yet it has not made business more honest. To rely on force rather than conscience to get people to do what is right is to undermine conscience. When people are forced, rather than persuaded, they will do what they are forced to do and no more. They will feel no sense of obligation.

More and more, the business world is filled with people who are governed by the principle of “what can we get away with”, rather than by what is right.

It was not always so. We must not be so naive as to imagine that there was ever a Golden Age when everyone was always honest – but things certainly used to be better than they are today.

Previous generations were less likely to see a conflict between doing what was morally right and doing what was in their own best interests.

Partly this was due to the greater emphasis that was placed on Reputation in those days. Business communities tended to be smaller, either because they were geographically isolated or because there might be a small number of specialists in very close correspondence. If a man did anything dishonest, it would soon be known by everyone and his chances of remaining in business would be negligible. Today, the global market is so big that it is unlikely that everyone will hear if someone has a bad reputation.

Mainly, however, it was because business communities usually had shared religious values.

Max Weber described the “Protestant Work Ethic”. The same principle which encouraged people to work hard to succeed in business – a desire to please God – also imposed strict honesty on those business dealings. Protestant devotional works sometimes recommend standards that seem laughable today – like not taking advantage of information that was unknown to the other party in a deal and not charging market price where the profit is excessive. Yet the people who read those works often became very wealthy, not least because they had a reputation for fair dealing.

In the same way, Jewish bankers were able to do business, even if the face of virulent Anti-Semitism, because they built a reputation for scrupulous honesty. This only irritated the Anti-Semites even more.

Even today, an entrepreneur is better off if he deals with someone who is concerned about his reputation for honesty – and who possibly believes that there is an Accounting beyond the balance sheets of this life – than relying on any number of laws and regulations and artificial codes for protection.

About the Author
Guy Kingston produces and presents the Mind Your Own Business podcast, offering free business advice to entrepreneurs and business owners. As well as audio podcasts there are more articles like this, compelling videos and a must-read blog. All at www.myobpod.com or you can network and join in discussions on the MYOB Facebook group.

• 2 Comments

  

Comments

Guy,
first let me tell you that I very much liked the view on the subject in the article and that it inspired me to write a comment on it. In the beginning, I reckoned a small paragraph ... as you can see it became a little more.

A very compelling argument to relate ethics to reputation and religious beliefs. And I would also agree that this must have contributed largely to the safe keeping of ethical business conduct.
In my work I'm faced with ethics related questions almost daily. I am responsible for the proper setup and conduct of clinical trials in humans.
As one might realize, these trials - sponsored research - very often are deterministic for the success or failure of a new drug or therapy. Thus, there are significant investments at stake (billions). And ergo, the larger the monetary involvement or market pressure the higher the temptation for a company to "stretch" the law, or interpret it in their favor, or simply break it. Unfortunately as we have seen in the past, those concerns are there for a good reason (Stark, Kickback, Anti bribing, ...).
The monetary temptation is one thing. But reputation by itself can also hinder ethical conduct. I am talking about the scientific laurels that come with being the first to publish - sometimes ground breaking - experimental results. I sometimes wonder if the scientific merits (reputation) that accompany those publications don't increase the risk of clinicians turning a blind eye on unethical circumstances to protect the overall outcome of the research.

This and many more things bring me to the conclusion that ethics are the very core of that business.

During my career I have learned that there are many mechanisms in different places to prevent unethical conduct of clinical trials from happening (Norms and regulations, i.e. Declaration of Helsinki, ICG/GCP, ISO 14155,FDA's blacklist, audits and the obligation to publish your trial results independently of the result ...). But I also experienced (and this goes beautifully with what you wrote earlier) that fair and moral conduct of business (independent of the industry) brings you the furthest (while simultaneously establishing peace of mind). This behavior also tends to have the nice side effect of rubbing off to people around you. Regulations don't show these characteristics.

So, I guess I can consider myself as lucky that my parents actually taught me right from wrong (which essentially is ethics) when bringing me up (without being overly religious). This free gift from them has served me well countless times. And interestingly enough in the majority of all cases, I found my gut feeling very consistent with what is written in the regulations. Translated that means for our business world that acting ethical means nothing else than "knowing right from wrong" and applying it in your work. As the parents only can influence us for some time in our lives, this is a plea for more role-models out there. I.e. the news agencies could do great things to society if they would report about positive conduct for a change.
When talking ethics, just like you I strongly believe that yet more laws and regulations to abide to will not bring the solution. Role-modeling and working on changing the value system of the society would be far more effective in this regard. This will pay off in the long run. People should become inspired to actually consider again what consequences their actions have for others.

Hope you found these lines worth reading and would be happy to hear back from you.

If you want to read more about the important questions clinical research is facing day in day out, and also how history contributed to the introduction of early and the development into today's guidelines, pl. read up the following link (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/clinical-research/). I found this this to be an extremely well written, interesting and complete article about Ethics in Clinical Research by David Wendler (first published on Jan 30th 2009).
And as it happens to be, I am working in Europe and therefore, we do our best to comply with the ethical industry standards of the medical device industry for Europe and should you be interested: EUCOMED (http://www.eucomed.org/abouteucomed/ethics.aspx).

Kind regards
Frank

 Posted by: Frank Schmidt at February 2, 2009 11:22 PM

Thanks Guy for the great article and for promoting ethics in business. For me, honesty is still the best policy and it gives us freedom. Integrity prevent us from having sleepless nights.

Actually it is because of lack of business ethics and values that many business and even the big businesses in the world falls down. Businessmen are humans and therefore should always possess the proper values and humanism.

 Posted by: Vic at February 7, 2009 6:29 PM

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