Column: Ethics don’t get in the way of business

By Stephen Dick

ANDERSON, Ind. — When I was in college many years ago, minoring in philosophy, I took a class on business ethics. It seemed like an oxymoron at the time, but today the two terms are almost mutually exclusive.

A recent column in USA Today by Alan M. Webber asked whether businesses should aim for a higher purpose than merely amassing money. It’s a cry in the dark because capitalism is completely amoral and sees nothing, neither lives nor communities, but the bottom line.

Webber includes a statistic, however, that is an eye-opener. In a recent study from Rutgers University among all graduate students, MBA candidates are the most likely to cheat. According to another survey of 623 students at 32 graduate business schools in the U.S. and Canada, 56 percent admitted to cheating.

What are they teaching in these schools? Webber says it’s all about winning, and students cheat to increase their odds at winning. Winning, in the business world, is about capturing fortunes and rewarding shareholders handsomely. Winning has nothing to do with workers or communities or being a good citizen. It’s all about positioning a company to be successful for short-term profits.

The students soaking up this self-serving nonsense have plenty of real-life examples: Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, the recent spy vs. spy at Hewlitt-Packard. In the movie “The Hustler” George C. Scott calls Paul Newman’s pool shark a loser. What’s makes a loser, Newman wonders. You shoot pool and at the end of the night you count up the money. Whoever has the most is the winner, replied Scott. This movie, made in 1961, paints the Scott character as the sleaziest opportunist imaginable. Nowadays, he’d be a hero.

Gene Hackman, as the embattled basketball coach in “Hoosiers,” tells a promising player that once upon a time the coach would’ve done anything to increase his advantage over another team. But he’s matured.

Business also models itself after Washington where scandals involving money (e.g. Jack Abramoff) are daily occurrences. No ethics in the Beltway. If it’s not money, it’s sex as in the Mark Foley cover up.

Webber asks the right question as he ponders the difference between business schools and those of law and medicine, which do have a higher, human purpose. “What’s the point of the exercise?” Webber asks about business schools.

What if instead of winning being synonymous with making money, business schools taught social values as the bottom line below the bottom line? What if businesses plowed profits back into communities to increase living standards, boost education and place citizenship above money? What if businesses learned to give as well as they take?

We can ponder these questions as long as we want, but it’s a pipe dream to imagine them. It’s a best-of scenario that will never come true because capitalism by design is to enrich only the top players. In society, we teach loyalty, duty, sacrifice and other good civic virtues. In business we teach cheating, selfishness, screw your neighbor and let nothing detract from making money.

Most Americans say, “It’s just business,” and, of course, the people we elect to represent us are powerless to change the goal of business because they are beholden to the corporations that pump money toward them.

A quarter of a century of conservative rule has made this an economic quagmire. In the eyes of the Supreme Court, businesses are equated with individuals, but we ask much more out of people, and hold them accountable in a different way, than we do corporations. Why is that? Why do corporations have a green light to do what they want with no thought given to citizenship?

Again, we have to go back to the laissez-faire, conservative market theory that’s been in effect since the rise of supply-side economics in the late 1970s. That theory says funnel money to the top and it will trickle down to everyone. Anyone who seriously promotes that is a liar and whoever buys into it is a fool. But it’s great for business and even greater for winning at business. Ethics have no role.

What’s said is that most MBA students are treated to ethics courses. They know the difference between right and wrong, but, like the Paul Newman character, they know that if they don’t have the most money at the end of the day, all the CEOs and economists will call them losers.

What is the point in the exercise, indeed, if your soul is lost in the process?



Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.

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