Here we have an analysis of a moral conundrum. Is it okay to take something of small value? Even if it is very small in value? The analysis here results in a finding of “still wrong whatever size.”
I agree with that.
But follow the line of reasoning and see if you would have worked through it the same way. It’s interesting.
James Pilant
via Kevin Benko
Removing top soil from school grounds to reduce radiation is a positive step. It does however provide a small harbinger of the enormous cost this disaster is going to impose in Japan for as much future as humans can reasonably foresee.
Generally nations recover from floods, chemical spills, rock slides, etc. and dare I say it, combinations of tsunami and earthquakes. Japan may recover economically but the damage to the land is permanent unless you look at history in terms of periods like the Jurassic.
It is questionable business ethics to promote PR that claims such disasters unlikely or impossible. It is questionable business ethics to subvert the government into downplaying or covering up incidents at your nuclear plants. It is questionable business ethics to pretend certainty when you don’t have any.
I expect giant corporations to lie, exaggerate and steal if at all possible. (Small corporations are much less likely to have these faults and are in many cases, excellent examples of morality and patriotism.) But permanently destroying the landscape has to considered unethical in an extreme sense.
James Pilant
Apparently being Un-American is not a matter of disagreeing with an energy company. A major corporation, Conoco Phillips, has discovered what makes an American and what does not.
Their conclusion runs as follows – If you oppose government subsidies for oil companies you are Un-American.
Conoco Phillips under intense questioning before Congress refuses to retract or apologize for this statement which by the way is in one of their press releases.
I would imagine it only makes sense to the company. They apparently consider the well-being of the company, profitability, to be an American value.
I believe that large multinational corporations believe that the United States serves to advance their interests and has no other purpose worth noting. Their adamant refusal to pay taxes, their attacks on public expenditures, their desire to speculate rather than creating value, their contempt and hatred for American workers and their unceasing efforts to turn the government into a subsidiary all point to a certain state of mind.
A bystander might consider a company that preaches free enterprise at every opportunity and yet makes a considerable portion of its profit from government subsidies might be at the least considered hypocritical or at the most, Un- American.
James Pilant
via The Local Crank
I found this essay to mirror some of my concerns. I try to point out to my classes (I teach college) that identifying with and having sympathy for criminals and wrong doers is usually wrong and when not directly wrong, questionable.
I remember my shock when asking my students who their heroes were and one young lady said the Hannibal Lector character in Red Dragon. After a long pause during which I tried to collect my thoughts, I pointed out that this might not be a good choice. I have also pointed out to my students that you hang pirates, that pirates do not sail in endless circles in the Caribbean on a kind of Carnivale Cruise Line vacation but sail to kill people and take their stuff. They find this a strange thought.
I tell them that your moral judgment has to be turned on all the time to be effective and that it requires considerable effort to do so after having been conditioned to root for the “hero” in thousands of television shows. As with all teaching I wonder how much I get across.
This a good article which takes the side of moral responsibility.
James Pilant
My thanks to Attacking the Page.
From the article –
Basically, codes are the rules we use to govern the way we want to live. Our codes of honor, ethics and conduct make up our conscious. They give us a moral compass for orienteering our way though life. Right or wrong, we all have a philosophy by which we live. And so should our characters.
This article refers and provides a link to the endowment effect. I had never heard of this economic theory. But now having read about it, I find it both fascinating and convincing. I appreciate the author bringing this idea to my attention.
I did not stop at reading this particular post, I explored the site reading a good number of posts. I very much enjoyed what I saw. I think you would profit by a similarly detailed look.
James Pilant
I have read that knowing the right questions may well be better than knowing the answers. This is because you can always ask the questions again when circumstances change and what used to be the answers is now irrelevant.
These are good questions.
I liked the opening comments about War and Peace. I never was able to get very far with it either but I did see the Russian six-hour movie. Maybe that counts.
James Pilant
Special thanks to Cognitive Noise (The best blog title I have seen in quite some time.)
via Cognitive Noise
I’ve been seeing these scams on the web and occasionally hearing them on the radio. These scammers are like vultures circling over people already in financial difficulties to extract their last dollar.
Business ethics? There really isn’t much to say. The people who run these scams are merely low life scum without any intention of providing any legitimate service. If there is no legitimate service in the first place, we are talking fraud.
If you are in foreclosure or near foreclosure – Follow the advice in this article.
James Pilant
In India, they are having a nation wide discussion, a debate over what can be done about corruption in that country. They have policemen who take bribes apparently as a regular part of their income. They have governmental scandals involving utterly incredible amounts of money.
Here we don’t have much of that kind of corruption. Because of this we think of ourselves as a less corrupt nation. In fact, we think highly of ourselves here in the United States.
But the kind of corruption we see here, it’s the really high quality kind. It’s legal. It’s incredibly profitable. And it conveys with complete accuracy the decay of our society and continuing decline in any level of trust for the government or business. More and more, they look more like a joint conspiracy than any attempt at the common welfare or simple profits.
Talking about business ethics is almost humorous. Almost.
James Pilant
And it’s raining hard. The decision made over time to place almost all the financing of education on the backs of the students is contrary to the practice in much of the world. It has had terrible consequences. College graduates are no longer able to make a wide variety of decisions as to what jobs to take, they must take the most profitable or profitable enough to stay even with their debts.
It forces students to choose the most profitable fields of endeavor and imposes horrifying penalties on those that make the wrong vocational choices. If you chose correctional officer as a career over the last two decades you scored, good job prospects, low but steady pay and a good package of benefits (if you avoided working for a private corrections company). But if you chose journalism you are probably eeking out a living as some minor paper shuffling prole. In that case, your debt load is crushing and is never going to go away.
You see, in a very real way, going for a higher education is gambling. There are no guaranteed professions or majors. History, economics and technology can shift winners and losers dramatically in a very few years. You can take many times more financial damage from a wrong choice in a college career than you can in a dozen gambling binge visits to Vegas.
But get this, when do people get to decide this critical decision? Usually when they have the least experience and knowledge – just out of high school.
I would be curious as to what the psychological effects of that kind of debt are over time. This is not just any kind of debt, creditors have power with this kind of debt they have with no other money owed.
They have counseling sessions to warn you about the consequences of student debt, that’s almost nothing compared to what’s needed. What is needed is an explanation of the risks being taken. Students should be told that double majors in different fields will significantly improve their chances of survival in a changing economy. They need to be told that income varies widely not by ability but by geography. It is much easier to pay off student loans with a salary earned on the coast. The more you move toward the center of the United States, the lower your income and the more a burden student loans will be. When I read the estimates of what college graduates will make based on national estimates, I just laugh. The job might have a starting salary of $44,000. Yeah, right. That’s about 65k to 70k in a state like New York and 24k in Kansas or Oklahoma.
We can do this better, but as usual the great intellects of the beltway will scream, “personal responsibility” over and over again. You see, the phrase, personal responsibility, means that no matter how deliberately misinformed, how unfair the deal, how distorted the situation, how manipulated a body of citizens are, it is irrelevant.
There is another word, we use in this country. It seems to have fallen out of favor. It’s called fairness. That means that we have to take into consideration the circumstances of the decision that led to the contract.
That means that when a college prints up thousands of pretty pamphlets selling their very expensive program in broadcast journalism so that you can become a television anchor, a job where there are only a few thousand jobs in the entire nation, we as a society get to ask some tough questions. Questions like “How much are you making selling this program?” “Were these students properly advised?” – that is, were they informed of the job prospects? Is there any data, any data at all, about successful employment out of the program?
Adherence to contracts is important, but so is fairness.
James Pilant
via iRok Fashion
Many videos on off-shoring are simple news stories or long commentary. This is a cartoon that discusses the effects of off-shoring on American workers and the ethics of it. The plot goes like this: an astronaut returns to earth from a long journey into space and the first person he encounters is a man who has been laid off from his job due to off-shoring. The conversation gets interesting very quickly.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.