In the previous descriptions one can see that besides many differences, there are also many similarities. Among others, there is awareness of the ethical and social dimen- sions of business and concern for human rights and the inherent human dignity of the person. If we carefully review the contents of codes of ethics and CSR we will also find many points in common. There are certainly some differences in each of the
22 D. Mel´e five areas we have considered, however, including cultural environment, business practices, government actions, civil society and the academy.
In order to understand in any depth what is common and what is different in Europe and America it could be useful to examine again their respective cul- tural roots. First of all, there is the fact that both Europe and America have deep roots in the ancient cultural and political development of Europe, especially be- fore the Reformation in the 16th century. I shall briefly present some relevant insights.
We should not forget that in the Middle Ages what we now call Europe had another name, Christendom; and this was much more than a simple name. In the 13th century the domain of Christendom extended from Ireland to the Urals and from North Sweden to the Gibraltar Straits in Spain. It is hard to say whether everybody had absolute common beliefs and even less common practices. Apart from the Orthodox schism in the 11th century, there was a great variety of ethnic groups. However, Christianity endowed people with a sense of belonging and a basic morality for the whole continent.
Medieval Christianity preserved and transmitted Roman Law. The Church herself adopted the basic Roman Law categories, developing and refining them in accor- dance with the Christian view of humanitas. Monasteries promoted learning, which was extended by cathedral schools. In the 11th and 12th centuries and under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, universities in Western Europe were born, as institutions of higher education and knowledge development. Scholasticism flour- ished in the medieval universities of the 13th century, where the most outstanding personality was Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74). He developed a strong intellectual construction joining together faith and reason and giving responses to the most con- troversial questions of his time. Aquinas knew Aristotle’s works and using Aris- totelian philosophy, at least in crucial points, developed a strong philosophical and theological edifice that was to have a great influence in Europe. Even at the present time, one can find outstanding scholars such as Gilson, Maritain, Pieper and Spae- mann who have re-elaborated a consistent Thomistic thought. Previously, Augustine of Hippo had used Platonic philosophy for his theology.
Common concepts in Western business ethics and other forms of ethics, are drawn largely from the Christian legacy, which, as has been said, assumed important concepts of Greek philosophy and Roman Law, along with Jewish moral precepts.
Think, for instance, of concepts such as human dignity, the golden rule, concern and responsibility for people, solidarity, a sense of stewardship with natural resources, the concept and content of virtues, and several norms related to the Ten Command- ments. Even human rights are implicit in Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Victoria (Theological School of Salamanca, starting in the 16th century, in Spain).
With regard to differences, if we return to European intellectual history, we will be able to shed light on some points. After Aquinas, an important change took place, with significant consequences for ethical theory. In the 14th century, William of Ockham introduced new ideas, which meant a breakdown between Aquinas’ thought and the philosophical foundations of the Christian faith. Ockham proposed nominalism, a philosophical approach which denies universal essences
Business Ethics: Europe Versus America 23 and emphasizes individuality, along with a legalistic vision of ethics derived from the arbitrary will of God.
This way of thinking introduced by Ockham eroded the alliance between rea- son and faith and questioned the moral authority of the Church. Ockham and some Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus, prepared the way for the Protestant Ref- ormation at the beginning of the 16th century, which strongly emphasised a faith absolutely separate from reason. The Protestant Reformation had marked political implications, including religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, especially in France, disdain for any institutional moral authority, as well as the introduction of a strongly individualistic position, both in the interpretation of the Bible and in the relationships between each individual and God. The main Protestant reformers, such as Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, found support in the political powers. The Protestant Reformation had a notable influence in Germany, Switzerland, England, the Scandi- navian countries and elsewhere. As a reaction, in the middle of the sixteen century, the Catholic Counter Reformation, in certain aspects related to theology, ecclesias- tical reconfiguration and the emergence of new spiritual movements and religious orders, had a notable influence in other European countries, such as France, Italy and Spain.
In the USA there were no religious wars. Many of the original European colonists went to America for religious reasons, looking for religious freedom. Many were fervent Protestants, especially Calvinists or branches akin to Calvinism and Zwingli (Reformed Church, Puritan, Presbyterian). Other immigrants were Lutherans and other religious denominations. This can help to explain the strong sense of religious freedom and also why religion has traditionally played a large role in American so- ciety, including culture and politics. French and Spanish colonization of vast regions of the USA and emigration from Latin America also brought in a large number of Catholics. Currently, more than 3 out of 4 American adults identify themselves as Christians.
For centuries in Europe, political power has had a great influence on economic activity (feudalism, charters of kings for commerce, etc.) and in culture, mainly in religious affairs (Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation).
Luther also took advantage of the political power of the German Princes for his protection and to spread the Reformation. The United States has a different history.
From the very beginning, the historical separation of Church and state was a matter of fact. Immigrants to America had the spirit of pioneers and a strong sense of en- trepreneurship. The religious beliefs of many immigrants emphasized the necessity of constant labour in a person’s calling as a sign of personal salvation (Protestant or puritan work ethic) and the duty of working for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole.
At least from the Renaissance, a legalistic view of ethics was widespread in Europe and then in America. From the 18th century, there emerged in some European countries a casuistic view of morality, while in America, the necessity of compliance with the law seemed extremely important in the multi-religious and multi-ethnic society that made up the US. This could create “compliance mindedness”, which could in turn at least partially explain why codes of ethics are so popular in the USA.
24 D. Mel´e Enlightenment thought was enormously important for both Europe and America.
The origin of this movement can be found in Ren´e Descartes (17th century), who rejected the human capacity of knowing reality, as stressed by Aquinas. Instead, he gave importance to the nature of thought rather than reality, following his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum). In this way, he conditioned the methodology for those who came after him. Two main schools of thought fol- lowed Descartes in the next century: the Rationalist (Spinoza and Leibniz, among others) and the Empiricist (Hobbes, Locke and Hume, among others). While ra- tionalists defended the view that all knowledge can be gained by the power of reason alone, the empiricists believed that all knowledge has to come through the senses, through experience. Thus, the rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, while the empiricists took the physical sciences. Philosophers of this period, during the so-called, “Age of Reason”, were great system builders.
They presented unified systems, which included everything from epistemology to ethics and politics. One of them was principally significant for the US, and not so much for Europe, especially Continental Europe, namely, John Locke. Another was David Hume. In his political philosophy, Locke defended the natural rights to life, property and liberty. He also argued that a government could only be legitimated by defending these rights and it receives the consent of the governed through a “social contract”. Locke’s views were particularly present in the American Constitution.
Hume presented a sentiment-based theory of ethics and so did Adam Smith, with his fellow sympathy-theory. Jurists at the beginning of the 18th century, such as Montesquieu and Blackstone, also had a considerable influence in founding the US.
Along with these thinkers, the Bible also had an important role for the Founding Fathers of the United States. As Michael Novak has written, “the founding gen- eration [of the United States] moved easily between faith and practical common- sense reasoning, indeed mounted upwards on both wings in unison.” (2002, p. 6);
and to prove this, among many other arguments, he mentions the findings of pro- fessor Donald Lutz, who counted 3,154 citations in the writings of the founders;
of these, nearly 1,100 references (34%) are to the Bible, and about 300 each to Montesquieu and Blackstone, followed at a considerable distance by Locke, Hume and Plutarch.
In Europe, the French Revolution was a politically decisive deed during the late 18th century, while the fall of European absolute monarchies characterized the 17th and part of the 18th centuries. The Enlightenment philosophy preceded and accom- panied the French Revolution. The Enlightenment advocated reason as a means to lead all forms of human activity and to establish an authoritative system that would allow human beings to obtain objective truth about the universe. Kant, probably the most mature philosopher of the Enlightenment, tried to overcome both Rational- ism and Empiricism in a comprehensive system of thought, with an ethical theory based on formal principles (categorical imperative), in line with a legalistic view of ethics.
Two intellectual “revolutions” of the 19th century were important for Europe and to a lesser degree for America, namely, Romanticism and Nihilism. These emerged against the intellectual and universalistic view of the Enlightenment, and
Business Ethics: Europe Versus America 25 also in opposition to aristocratic, social, and political norms of this period. Roman- ticism emphasized emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority. Nihilism, often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, is also a radical position against Enlightenment philosophy.
Nihilism argues that the world, especially past and current human existence, is with- out objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following: there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, a “true morality” is unknown, and secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has no truth and no action is known to be preferable to any other. Nietzsche proposed the will of power as the basic guide- line for survival in life. These subjectivist visions, along with other philosophies developed in the 20th century in Europe, such as positivism, existentialism and structuralism, have produced an intellectual panorama full of scepticism, a strong laicism, full of relativism in some matters (abortion, family rights, etc.) but with absolute principles in others (homosexual rights, reduction of religion to a private matter, etc.).
Finally, to conclude this brief synthesis, the European legacy takes into account the terrible experiences of two world wars in the 20th century and various totali- tarian regimes, the incredible genocides perpetrated under Hitler and Stalin. These terrible events have constituted for the whole world but mainly for Europe, a sort of catharsis, for being permanently in favour of democracy, social welfare and against all kinds of totalitarian political systems.
It is hard to predict the future but I contend that a certain convergence between Europe and America can take place, without omitting any of their genuine distin- guishing characteristics. Presently, democracy, human rights and the battle against corruption are some of the points of convergence. The role of the state in encour- aging business ethics and CSR could change, but not too fast. In Europe, there is a certain discontent about an excessive intervention of the state in public and cultural affairs, although the role of the state will hardly change. In the USA, public power, civil society and business are undertaking initiatives to increase the practice of busi- ness ethics (Sentencing Guidelines, voluntary code of ethics for foreign practices), but the traditional government action to combat abuses exclusively by limiting busi- ness actions is not decreasing (think, for instance on the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 in the face of recent financial scandals).
Last but not least, other basic elements in business ethics can be discovered on both sides of the Atlantic. I would like to mention three. First, the necessity of overcoming the separation thesis (Freeman, 1994) by which ethics and economics are two separate realities. The recognition of ethics as an integral part of any busi- ness would be a great advancement. Second, the recognition of the importance of virtues for business ethics and, in particular, the recognition of virtues as an es- sential part of personal competency for business. Third, it would be advantageous to business to recover a rationality open to transcendence, as Pope Benedict XVI has proposed, which is to overcome both the narrow rationalism of the Enlighten- ment and vagueness of most post-modernistic visions common to both Europe and America.
26 D. Mel´e
Notes
1. In accordance with the last Eurobarometer, exactly 46% agree and 48% disagree on the question:
Is the place of religion in our society too important? Eurobarometer 66. Public Opinion of the European Union (First results, December 2006): http://ec.europa.eu/public opinion/archives/eb/
eb66/eb66 highlights en.pdf accessed on December 28, 2006.
2. http://www.csr.gov.uk/pdf/dti csr final.pdf accessed on December 27, 2006.