A Crisis of Ethics

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “ethic” as, “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation; a set of moral principles; a theory or system of moral values; the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group; a guiding philosophy; a consciousness of moral importance; a set of moral issues or aspects (as rightness).” By its very definition, ethics assumes that a set of absolutes are in place from which such a discipline could be derived. Without these absolutes in place, ethics will not have a foundation to stand on.

The question then is, “who determines what these absolutes are, and how do we determine whether such absolutes are immutable?” The source and character of absolutes are important considerations in defining a system of ethics, and this issue of source and character is at the heart of our present crisis of ethics.

Generally speaking, the ethics that govern business interests and stakeholder value are not bound by moral absolutes but by material expediency. It is not a question of right or wrong, but a question of minimizing risk and maximizing material gain. The ethics that parameterize the business environment is not about equitable exchange but one oriented towards securing much from very little. Most of the time, how a person defines what is ethical or morally upright in a relationship is usually determined by how much one wants to extract, or how one desires to be treated and not necessarily on a set of moral absolutes. In the world of business, it seems, only size matters at the end of the day.

At the inter-personal level, ethics is governed implicitly by social class and tradition and not on a set of universally accepted moral absolutes. Those who are of the elite have the capability of determining the ethics that he or she wishes to employ, often biased towards how she or he thinks would be to their best interest. We live in an age where everyone feels that he or she deserves more that what they have, and are driven to act in ways that force their own interests and maximum benefit on a given situation. In extreme cases such even leads to feuds that span several generations. We are predisposed to force our will at the expense of another’s liberty, to force our own comfort at the expense of another’s misery. The values taught in the home are now considered as convenient guidelines which are dispensable; only important and “absolute” only when such principles serve to benefit personal gain or interests.

Collateral damage, survival of the fittest, risk of mutual destruction, acceptable casualty, many shades of gray, plausible deniability, legal loop-holes, moderated transparency, material expediency, competitive advantage, situation ethics, white lies, are only a few examples of the many constructs that govern modern thinking processes as we know it today; constructs that run contrary to the vein of moral absolutes. This condition characterizes our inter-personal relationships, be it in business, private, or even our religious affairs. Truth, by popular definition, is no longer based on what is right and moral, but on what can be explicitly proven. Even the constructs of right and moral are often considered as relative in nature, with its definition and application dependent on the immediate context wherein it will be, or is applied. While we could say that humanity has not completely abandoned the ideal of absolutes, it may just as well be the case since classifying these absolutes as mere ideals implicitly and categorically suggests that these ideals are more an exception rather than the rule.

Recent movements or fads to re-introduce ethics into the business environment have been mediocre at best. Total Ethics Management or TEM, for example, posits ethics as relative rather than absolute—a system of ethics based on context. Frank Jurgen Richter and Pamela C.M. Mar, for example, in their book, Asia’s New Crisis: Renewal through Total Ethics Management, compiles contributions of different executives from some of the top corporations around Asia and the Asia Pacific Region on the subject of ethics management. In this book a substantial amount of space was devoted to discussing the benefits of eastern religious beliefs in an attempt to show how such belief systems framed the basis of successfully building a system of ethics within the contributor’s specific contexts. Several pages was devoted to discuss the merits of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Islam. That these authors failed to include a treatment on Judaism and Christianity into their treatise is perhaps indicative, on the one hand, of their conviction of Christianity’s inferiority, its inability to provide a suitable framework for the world to solve its crisis of ethics. On the other hand, it could also be that the authors considered the orthodoxy that characterizes the Judeo-Christian faith as too rigid and uncompromising given that the Judeo-Christian faith is based on absolutes it considers to be universal and immutable. By choosing to be eclectic, Richter and Mar introduced a definition of ethics, not as a function of absolutes, but situational expediency to synthesize global business culture with local religious belief—Judeo-Christianity as the exception—a method that follows Hegelian dialectic methods.

Their approach did not solve the problem, it simply compartmentalized it to a local context. What they did was force the issue of ethics as function of context and not of absolutes. The book suggests that if you want to build a global and socially responsible company, you need to introduce ethics back as a mainstream behavior, but do so in a manner that will remain consistent with local religious beliefs. This method may sell a lot of books, but it is far from solving the crisis of ethics that plagues humanity today.

Ethics is a matter of universal absolutes, and until we are able to reckon with absolutes, until we are able to accept absolutes as universal and immutable, humanity will constantly be plagued by the complexity and degenerative effects of relativism to the point of complete ethical desensitization. By attempting to localize the meaning and implications of ethics, we make issue of ethics a non-issue. If everyone can make their own set of absolutes, then in reality there are no absolutes. And without absolutes, one does not possess moral authority. Without moral authority, all that is left is material expediency.

Do we really want to live in a world openly governed by material expediency? Even those who often take advantage of others would refuse to be at the receiving end of their behavior. To minimize this possibility, they resort to methods that appeal to the sense of ethics and absolutes of those they exercise authority over. This is where absolutes are typically seen as most useful—when it is employed to control or limit the actions of another. But when it comes to having absolutes control how they act, well, this becomes a completely separate and dispensable issue.

We cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. There is much wisdom in this statement. But despite this clear message, we have never really taken Einstein’s words beyond its anecdotal value. What will become of us in the very near future? If we do not change our course, we will all suffer the consequences. We will sink further into the mire of our pretenses. Worse still, instead of leaving a legacy our children could be proud of, we will leave them with problems compounded over time-accursed by the work of our own hands. We have been at the crossroads for quite sometime now and we need to define a new paradigm, a new way of providing for real answers and sustainable solutions based on absolutes; absolutes that are universal and immutable if we are to secure a better future for humanity as a whole.

Surely progress does not have to be secured at the expense of moral absolutes. In the final analysis, this crisis of ethics will only persist if we allow it to. Teaching ourselves to live on the basis of principle is the first step towards sustainable solutions, the first step to solving our crisis of ethics. But if we allow ourselves to remain bound to material expediency, we will never break free of the yoke that enslaves our lives and the generations of lives that follow us.