by Jonathon Bright

Created on: August 06, 2010   Last Updated: April 12, 2011

Good business ethics and making a profit can both happen at the same time. It is a mistake to assume all individuals and businesses will behave unethically. But it is also a mistake to assume all individuals and businesses with behave ethically.

Famously, Google say “You can make money without doing evil” – its number six on their “Ten things we know to be true” corporate philosophy. Of course, it's possible to make money by doing evil but are we too quick to assume the worst when looking at companies that make large profits?.

One of the things to understand is what gives the opportunity for greed to exist in the first place. An individual may be put in a position in a company where they are able to operate in a way that their company doesn't detect. This may be for personal gain, to hit targets or to recover a situation where they are incurring losses that they do not want to reveal to their bosses. Who is at fault here? The individual or the business that allows them to do it?

Individual greed is generally caused when people are presented with an opportunity to make a lot of money. Most people wouldn’t behave unethically for a few dollars but if the potential benefit was many hundreds or thousands of dollars then the temptation becomes much greater.

Greed is more tempting in situations where there is great inequality. This can be in a poor country where rising to a certain level of authority can give individuals an opportunity to exploit their position. It can be in an economy where there is rapid change allowing corporations and individuals to exploit the masses to make unusually large profits.

The history of any country shows numerous examples of exploitation. What has happened in most countries is the growth of people power – trade unions and so on which have fought for the rights of the common man and to stop exploitation. A lot of modern companies employ people called “Corporate Social Responsibility” managers whose job it is to police the company to make sure ethical standards are maintained in their business dealings.

The positive thing about the 21st century is that a lot of the developed world has been through this already. This means that emerging economies where inequality does exist (giving rise to greed and exploitation) are more closely monitored.

So yes, ethics can and will overcome greed in the 21st century. Human kind has come a long way in the last one hundred years – there is still a long way to go but we're getting quicker all the time at preventing exploitation when we find it. Not quick enough, but quicker than ever. As Lennon once sang, “You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one”.

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