Talk about virtue is not as vague as some might think. It is easy enough for any em- ployer to think out and list the characteristics he or she would want in an employee:
honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, sharp business sense, patience, perseverance and so forth. When hiring, employers want appropriate technical proficiency and experience. They also want to assess the prospective employee on other levels. The CV and references usually cover knowledge and experience. The desire to interview the candidate, a desire that usually varies directly with the level at which appoint- ment is to be made, reflects the employer’s need to get some sense of the candidate.
Implicit in that is a belief that in a face-to-face interview the interviewer can get an idea of what kind of person the candidate is, reflected in how he/she answers questions, responds to challenges, thinks on his/her feet and interacts with others.
Relevant information is also picked up in the little details of dress and deportment, of manner and facial expression.
There is a strain of thought that dismisses ethics as irrelevant to the hard, ruthless world of business, where tough competition is as much a reality as cooperation, and where the metaphor of business as war comes easily to mind. Maybe individuals can be virtuous – but only in the non-business part of their lives. In the actual world of business, and particularly in today’s world where open markets, free trade, compe- tition, breakup of monopolies and privatization are the order of the day, the pressure to survive is enormous. Little wonder that many high-minded idealists dismiss the heartless world of business, like the world of war, as almost inherently immoral.
Correspondingly, those who operate in such zones return the compliment, and dis- miss ethics as soft-hearted and therefore irrelevant to their world. It is easy to show that the position expressed in the last sentence is mistaken, since there are obvious ethical qualities prized in business and war: business requires trust in certain key relationships, just as soldiers prize loyalty to comrades, and both find that virtue is the one thing they can hold on to as matters get difficult. Still, there may be something important behind that line of thought which ethicists need to hear.
One can see how ethics may seem too soft, precious, ineffectual, and idealistic to be of any earthly use in the tough zones of human life. Considering how ethics is often presented, and how ethicists themselves often appear, it is no surprise that some people might sense that ethicists are precious and out of touch, so ethics must be like them, soft, flabby and unfit, and ill-adapted to survive in harsh terrain. What answer can there be to such a challenge? For a start, an ethic need not be soft – and probably should not be, if it is genuine. A relativistic ethics will rightly be dismissed (by the people referred to in the previous paragraph) as simply not serious.
Relativism is so pliable that it offers no resistance or challenge, and is no more than a comfort blanket to make weak people “feel good about themselves”. In sufficiently
128 J.G. Murphy harsh environments, comfort blankets may be positively dangerous. Accordingly, better to dismiss all ethics than accept a relativistic ethic; better an atheist than an idolator. Second, a serious ethic is one that proposes tough challenges. I do not mean that in the sense of being high-mindedly idealistic, where the goals may not merely be unreachable but are irrelevant to the business or imprudent in the view of the person experienced in that zone of activity. I mean rather that the ethic is in some way a response to the operational conditions in that zone of activity in a way that is both robust and realistic. The “tough challenges” must be those that are recognizable by a businessperson as those appropriate for the business world, even if unwelcome or daunting.
I referred at the outset of this chapter to the ethical elements permeating business, the ethics implicit in the understandings and practices found in the manifold aspects of a life spent in business. There is something to be said for the idea of an ethics emerging from what has come to be seen as “best practice” in the business world.
The idea can be illustrated by reference to Nancy Sherman’s recent book, Stoic Warriors: the Ancient Philosophy, where she relates Stoic philosophy to soldiering.
I use the more ambiguous term “related” rather than “applied”, for the relating is not an application of Stoic theory from the outside, prior to getting a sense of the moral atmosphere of a soldier’s life. She states at the outset:
It doesn’t take too great a stretch of the imagination to think of a POW survivor as a kind of Stoic sage, for the challenge the POW lives with is just the Stoics’ challenge: to find dignity when stripped of nearly all nourishments of body and soul.. . .Most military men and women do not think of themselves in Epictetian terms. Yet they do think of themselves, or at least they have idealized notions of military character, as stoic in the vernacular sense of the term. The traits that go with stoicism are familiar: control, discipline, endurance, a sense of “can-do” agency, and a stiff upper lip, as the Brits would say. In a less elegant American phrase, to be stoic is to be able to ‘suck it up’.7
In some way, the Stoic ethic appears to emerge from the conditions and exigencies of life in soldiering. One can see how soldiers might gravitate towards it, as something that is relevant to their situation. It is, quite obviously, not a soft ethic. Nor is its being “high-minded” particularly relevant. What one needs is not so much high ideals as an ethic that will “stand to” one when under pressure, and help one “push back as hard as the world that pushes against” one.8Unlike the moral code, it is not an ethic of universal “do’s” and “don’ts”. Yet it does not fail in objectivity, for even pacifists and those who would never want to be soldiers can still admire the character traits mentioned. Whether it is the best ethic available is also somewhat irrelevant.
No doubt there are flaws in stoicism, and it could be corrected or enriched by input from other strains of thought. But it still captures something of what is needed to be a “good soldier”. Something similar is needed in business. It may actually be harder in that world, for the soldier’s experience of the “No-atheists-in-foxholes”
syndrome, of desperate situations where you do not know whether you will come out alive, would seem to have no counterpart in the business world. But if it is harder, that is all the more reason for it to be developed.
I close by suggesting the need for dialogue between businesspeople and ethicists on the kind of ethic that would emerge from, that would be natural to, the business
People in Business 129 world. An ethic of law-observance is not enough, and takes no imagination. The drawing-out or explication of an ethic that would be in some way admirable to both people in business and those in other walks of life, yet clearly grounded in business experience, should be the goal of that ongoing dialogue.
Notes
1. Elaine Sternberg 1994, Just Business (London: Little Brown) is an example of a narrow conception of business ethics. It defines (business) ethics as having to do solely with moral codes governing individual behaviour (75–76), but not covering the behaviour of the company or the character traits or values of people engaged in business.
2. See R.C. Warren 1999, “Company legitimacy in the new millennium”, Business Ethics: A European Review 8: 214–224.
3. In some parts of the world, notably the poor rural parts of Africa, popular attitudes are such that a foreign company simply would not be allowed by the local people to operate if it refused to do things like fund a school, a drainage scheme, etc. Milton Friedman’s thesis cuts no ice in such places.
4. Reported in “Two-faced capitalism”, The Economist (22/01/2004). For a CEO’s critique of CSR, see Ian Davis, “The biggest contract”, The Economist (26/05/2005).
5. See in particular Patricia Werhane 1991, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism (Oxford); also Amartya Sen 1987, On Ethics and Economics (Blackwell), 22–28.
6. It’s the “Lord Jim” test. In Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim, Jim is the first mate on a ship, the only idealistic man among a cynical and selfish crew. At a crucial moment, believing the ship is about to sink, he joins the others in abandoning the ship with its crowd of helpless passengers. There is some truth to the claim that his action is out of character; he hates himself for it, and spends the rest of his life atoning for his weakness and betrayal. More profoundly, however, it may be self-contradictory to say that a person’s action in a given instance was “out of character”, since action both reveals and shapes character.
7. Nancy Sherman 2005, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (Oxford University Press), 1.
8. The “push back” quotation is from Flannery O’Connor.