by Shawn Kew

Created on: February 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Business success is not an outcome of practicing good ethics. The sooner we understand that the world of ethics and business are exclusive of each other, the better off everyone will be. Ethics and business are both different systems of value that we need to understand are not necessarily compatible. It is also important to recognize that ethical business comes after the fact.

Our current cultural ideology that business success and good ethics are linked together is false, and moreover destructive. The problem is not just that we will overlook the successful, but unethical business that exists; more sinister is that this memo gets exported to other walks of life. It is in the name of this that substandard health care persists all over the world. The fact is that when healthcare becomes for profit, every single time, people will die. Not because they could not be saved, but because someone did not want to put in the resources. Business takes everything in the world and makes it all into a resource in a mathematical equation designed only to maximize the output, whenever the calculation is made.

The business ethicist is the very worst kind of sophist, that is a man who claims to be wise because he argues either side with equal success. The problem with business ethics is that business and ethics are both systems of value judgements. As a result there may be times when values are shared by each, however there are also instances where the two are mutally exclusive. The problem arises because they are systems and neither system is functional as individual values. Furthermore, the business ethicist is commiting high treason in subverting ethics to the purposes of business. After all, if ethics are supposed to be the very best thing that can be done in a given situation, they cannot have any other end or purpose in mind.

Furthermore, it is dificult to discern which sucessful businesses are sucessful because they are ethical, or ethical because they are sucessful. The fact is the ethical choice often requires a greater expenditure of resources in the short term, and sometimes even the long term, than its unethical equivalent. Consider the shoe manufacturing industry: Would it not be ethical to improve the working conditions of places like India and China? In the short term, certainly this would decrease the profit margin of shoe manufacturers who use these countries as homes for their factories; they would have to pay a greater wage to the workers they employ in those places for a start. One might argue that in the long run they would increase the number of people with a disposable income large enough to purchase their product and therefore increase demand, which would increase profit. On the other hand, increasing demand without increasing supply would increase the price, and eventually someone would be unable to afford these products, so with a steadily increasing population and an ultimately finite pool of refinable resources, eventually someone has to be exploited in order to make a profit, which is what a sucessful business does.

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