2.4 Business Ethics
2.4.14 Critique of business ethics
Religious authors such as John Maxwell are of the view that a specific business ethics does not exist. Salb (2016) writes: “In his book, There’s No Such Thing as ‘Business’
Ethics, John C. Maxwell firmly contends that there is no difference between business ethics and general moral behaviour.” He believes that ethics is neither a business nor a social issue but, instead, a personal issue. Maxwell (cited in Salb, 2016) believes that people use different sets of ethics for their professional life, spiritual life and family life, and argues that people who wish to be ethical should live by one standard. He believes that people behave unethically because of the convenience and the desire to
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win no matter the cost. In addition, people rationalise their choices with relativism by choosing their own ethical standards to guide their behaviour. Maxwell suggests that to guide the ethical mind set and establish an “integrity guideline” one needs to be guided by the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would want them to do unto you.
The concept of the Golden Rule is not without critics. In his 2004 article entitled
“Misleadership on Ethics: John Maxwell”, Gill states that Maxwell’s assertion that there is no difference between personal and business ethics is inaccurate in the world of corruption and ethical problems in business. In Gill’s view, Maxwell is wrong to rule out any specialised focus on business ethics. Gill argues that business ethics makes people reflect on matters of right and wrong, good and bad, in a business environment.
He writes that there is nothing about a business ethics enterprise that requires a contradiction between personal ethics and business ethics and argues that people who practise business ethics are usually people who work hard to practise good morals in the workplace, business organisations and in the economy in general.
According to Gill (2004), by criticising this attempt, Maxwell is doing businesses an injustice at a time when business ethics is required.
Engelbrecht (2012:339) is of the view that business ethics lacks a component of radicality. He states that:
…business ethics should not only contribute to more responsible business practices, more morally sensitive business managers and more ethical organisational cultures, but should also facilitate social hope via hermeneutic strategies aimed at changing the way we think about ourselves, our economies and the roles and responsibilities of business as such.
In Engelbrecht’s view, apologetic business ethics should be supplemented with a radical version of business ethics.
Radical business ethics, according to Engelbrecht (2012:348), “has the aim of protecting business ethics as a space in which ethical considerations trump business considerations, and in which ethics can act as medium of critique to transform
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business and the political and economic framework that acts as its condition of possibility. Put differently, promoting a radical business ethics means guarding against a conservative and nihilistic ethics in business, as well as business ethics reduced to a mere management tool or ‘soft control’.”
Neo-Aristotelian Alisdair MacIntyre (cited in Giddy, 2014:111) states that, “the values associated with the culture of commerce that has dominated modernity are seen by Robert Spaemann as a breakaway from the framework of loyalty and commitment (and virtues) that, it is argued is the only possible framework for ethical reasoning…”
Giddy argues that “rights” usually pertain to entities (human beings) simply by virtue of their possession of certain properties and not because they are deemed to conform to certain models of behaviour embedded in the ethical traditions. He seems to support Spaemann’s assertion that it is only in the light of our prior commitment to a moral community that embodies such models that ethical reasoning of whatever kind makes sense. The commitment needs to be explicitly drawn upon by the interlocutors as a starting point. This, argues Giddy, is what the proportionalist approach compels.
To fully understand and appreciate the proportionalist approach, Giddy provides an example of a how a footballer’s commitment to the nature of the game, and to the other participants, determines the meaning of “excellence” in this particular social practice, which excludes “diving” as a disproportionate means to their intended end or biting an opponent’s shoulder. It is noted that Giddy (2014:111), whilst supporting Spaemann’s argument, posits that the argument should be complemented by MacIntyre’s re-presentation of the virtue approach to ethics, if it is to be applicable to the current age.
Giddy (2014:112) argues that, “Proportionalist reasoning is most widely known through the Just War principles, and, in particular, the precept that the means taken should be proportionate, or not unreasonably disproportionate, to the intended end.” He provides an example of a manager firing a worker who has children at home to feed and educate. He argues that this might indeed be a morally good thing to do when judged in proportion to the end. The bad effect is foreseen but not intended. This is what proportionalist ethicists call the “principle of double effect”.
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Prasad and Agarwal (2015), in their article aptly entitled “The Oxymoron that is
‘Business Ethics’”, present the view that business ethics can be thought of as an oxymoron in that an entrepreneur can either do business or can be ethical; he cannot be both, at least successfully. Vieta (cited in Prasad & Agarwal, 2015:13) is of the opinion that “the fundamental problem with traditional capitalism is that the creators of value are different from the appropriators of value; and it is this difference between the two that has grown over a period of time that is causing the problem. Apart from questions of the morality of the entrepreneurial rent seeking behaviour, the current model of capitalism is flawed in the sense it does not address the problem of income inequality and distribution either inter-temporally or inter-spatially.” Dobb (cited in Prasad and Agarwal, 2015) suggests: “In a partial attempt to obviate the problem, ethical codes of conduct have been established so as to have a partial convergence between the Kantian dilemma about moral and pragmatic imperatives.”