https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_education_movement

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/5/russias-war-on-ukraine-forces-europe-to-weaponise-its-economic-might

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/05/letitia-james-jbs-meat-lawsuit-greenwashing

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/schools-close-and-crops-wither-as-historic-heatwave-hits-south-east-asia

About twenty years ago, I had an appointment to see a colleague at the college where I taught. She was in a meeting with a student who was having a bit of a crisis and I didn’t have a problem waiting knowing my friend’s superlative skills in counseling would provide some closure and help to the student but that it would take a while. There was a pile of old (most of them more than ten years old) Newsweek and Time magazines. So, I decided to look at the Business Ethics stories in those magazine. I was teaching the subject at the time and I though a historical view might be interesting.

The magazines had no stories of business ethics failures. The only references I could find was oblique ones when talking about a famous person’s past or that list of short paragraphs of what was in current new that they sometimes featured. I thought about this hard for a long time and realized the truth. It would have been damaging to the magazine profitability to disclose or even reference the scale and illegality of corporate wrong doing. The fact is business ethics was not an issue in terms of reporting for many in the media for many decades and that is still true of much media today.

Each day I search through major media outlets and good number of minor ones looking for subjects to write about. I’ve listed four pretty typical story ideas up with links listed at the top of this essay.

I want you to understand my thought processes and attempts at finding compelling topics to write about. The first one is a subject dear to my heart. I was fourteen years old and looking through books in the Pryor Public Library in Northeastern Oklahoma — and I found Mortimer J. Adler’s “How to Read a Book.” I devoured it. According to my school testing my reading level was “college, two years” and I knew I was pretty good but this book taught me how far I had to go. So, I learned to read the whole in terms of the parts and the parts in terms of the whole.

But what was more important was the list at the end of the book. There was a list of the great books of the Western world. It has been many years and in that time I have read about a third of them. I believe that one of the best ways to learn the best behavior and concepts of morality is the study of those books. So, a good topic to write about – something I have familiarity with.

The second topic about is about changes in Europe. All of our NATO allies are in the midst of movement in terms of policy toward the aggression of the Russians and the inability of the United States to find unity or purpose. Allowing the freedom fighters of the Ukraine to die for the political advantage of Donald Trump and the Republican party is a stain on our nation that will not be erased for quite some time.

I try not to write about international affairs or the horrible coming election very much. They are not really business ethics issues unless you stretch the concept quite a bit. But they do present moral and ethical questions many of them critical issues of life and death.

In Christianity as expressed in the New Testament, Jesus remarks that if you are ashamed of him and his words, he will be ashamed of you in the next world. I believe that. But it seems to me to be just the same when it comes to morality, ethics and doing what is right. If you fall silent in the face of evil and crime, why should God take notice of you in the next life? I have a duty to call out the criminal, to call out the wrong doer and to demand justice. So, you’ll seen the occasional foreign affairs and political piece in my writings. It is a duty to my morality.

The third topic is New York State is suing a major meat producer for “green washing,” pretending that you are protecting the environment verbally and in advertisements while in fact doing little or nothing. This is where the vast majority of business ethics textbook writers feel very much at home. This is a traditional business ethics issue and becoming more and more a legal issue. But this kind of corporate misconduct however serious in the long term is legalistic, complex and requires just oodles of explanatory text. I don’t mind writing it but it seems to me that readers run away from complexity unless you pretty up with stories of the dead and the dying and maybe some pictures. I’ll probably give this topic a miss.

The fourth topic is about climate change. The danger of our looming climate crisis is a real loser online. People do not want to read about it. That is what my analytics show on this particular topic. I agree it is depressing. But there are people out that who want to pretend it is not happening and if they prevail, millions will die, many more millions will be displaced and every part of the world will be effected and effected badly. The subject demands attention based on morality and ethics. My public may find this discouraging. It still needs to be discussed. Here’s a quote from the article:

A “historic heatwave” is being experienced across south-east Asia, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian. In updates posted on X, he said heat that was unprecedented for early April had been recorded at monitoring stations across the region this week, including in Minbu, in central Myanmar, where 44C was recorded – the first time in south-east Asia’s climatic history that such high temperatures had been reached so early in the month. In Hat Yai, in Thailand’s far south, 40.2 C was reached, an all-time record, while Yên Châu in north-west Vietnam hit 40.6C, unprecedented for this time of year.

A temperature of 44C is 111 degrees Fahrenheit. I think I should talk about this.

This is how I work through topics. I am trying to make a difference, to find meaning and significance with my writing. Let us cooperate in this joint endeavor, I the writer and you, the reader and observer of this written attempt at moral processing.

James Alan Pilant