Ethics With Everything

A Talking Economics Evening in Stroud - June 5th

Writing from the World Economics Forum in Davos last year, Times columnist Gary Duncan wryly commented that it was a case of ‘ethics with everything’ as if in the business community today one dare not stand up and speak without shouting out one’s benign intentions. The ever increasing number of ‘ethical’ companies bears witness to this phenomenon, ‘ethical’ here meaning that the word ‘ethical’ is somehow used in conjunction with the company name viz The Ethical Property Company, The Ethical Travel Guide, The Ethical Partnership and so on … but such an observation is not intended to belittle the word, rather to put the question: what does ethical mean?

Writing in Associative Economics Monthly June 06, Mathias Bolt Lesniak an entrepreneur from Norway describes the approach behind that associative economics Quality Guarantee Mark that leaves the responsible individual free to ‘define’ ethical, while opening himself up to a process of accountability:

Attempting to run an ethical business requires that you put your own decisions under great scrutiny. Whatever you do, it should have positive implications. Society as a whole and coming generations should benefit from your actions, and in the long term that means you too. A business cannot call itself ethical without working actively on where and what it spends its money. …Whether you are still ethical now becomes your subjective definition, but subjective definitions are dangerous. The danger is that you cut down too far, and define ‘ethical’ as something too imprecise. As a sole proprietor, associative economics gives me a control function for my own definition of “ethical”, and it gives me a conscious way to become better at what I am doing. By opening up my economy to others, I make public the reasons for my definition.

A like approach might be to say that behind any ethical activity, an ethos must be present. Already one can sense in the word ‘ethos’ a less prescriptive mood. Ethos could be taken to mean character: every person or organisation has character of one kind or other. The character may be of a more social-mission-fulfilling or a more profit-maximising kind. If one makes a mild caricature of the charity and the public corporation – one might be tempted to say that in one or the other case the invested capital can either stand for a declared social good or it can mechanically devote itself to ever increasing returns, with the corresponding ethos arising from the logic of the aim it chooses in its design. Here then is the crucial question – whether or not one can purposefully design an ethos; not only saying what the ethos is but demonstrating the veracity of the claim. This is surely only a matter of spelling out what lies behind the business activity (whether it be a corporation or a charity or a state or a sole trader) and enshrining the idea within a legally binding construct such that it can neither be displaced by the expedience of management nor by the power of capital. If this were to happen then the desired ethos would be able find a suitable body in the company, providing an orientation for all who work for it … and if everybody were able to do this, then presumably no one would deny the idea of ethics with everything? Who knows, they might begin to celebrate it - after all, why not?