Tag: ethics

An Education Of Greed Destroys Nations

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments
From the Independent.ie (Ireland), Anto Kerins writes –
Our graduates need an understanding of, and a facility for, effective regulations, appropriate rules and ethical frameworks to guide organisational behaviour so as to ensure the safety and vibrancy of our economy and society.
 
 

 

From producing graduates who absorbed the mantra of deregulation and light-touch rules, we must now imbue them with the importance of ethical and regulatory frameworks and the ability to distinguish between rules that keep us safe, solvent and effective and those that just take up time.
 
 
 

 

 

 

Ireland has just experienced an ethics meltdown in the financial sector. I believe they are taking much stronger action than we have contemplated to solve the problem. I do not believe their anger is leaving any time soon. They have no beltway “wisdom” that is everything is okay except for those whiny unemployed. There is a determination for this to never happen again.

Read further –

While the economic and regulatory wings of Government are now desperately trying to get us out of the hole we are in, it is mainly to education that we look to ensure this crisis never happens again. Although the Government and its agencies are feverishly working to bed down a powerful and effective regulatory regime to keep us afloat, it is to education that we look to encourage the long-term development and sustenance of this framework.

I’m reading through the Hunt Report. It is not like anything I have seen in the United States. We have been all about job training and getting rid of those annoying history, philosophy, art and literature classes. The Hunt Report emphasizes the need for more of these, not less. I’ll be posting on this later.


James Pilant

Reading is Critical to Ethics

On By southwerkIn ethics

This is a quote from an interview with Mary Gordon about her new book, Reading Jesus.

One of the things that I wanted to explore in this project is what kind of reading scripture demands. In one sense, it’s reading, just like reading the instructions for your DVD player, or King Lear, or a graphic novel. But that verb isn’t adequate for all these different experiences. This is a text that you may have thought—as I once did—was the Word of God, literally containing your salvation or damnation. It has a whole overlay of your personal history, your anguish, and the culture of the West. It has your coloring book and it has Bellini. It has the horrible ranting of anti-Semites and of people who hate the body, but it also has Oscar Romero and George Herbert. The Gospels carry so much in them, so the reading can never be simple. It is a uniquely complicated experience.

Simple reading is a simple matter of understanding a sentence and perhaps another sentence. Real reading means that you can understand the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts; that is, you can see how sentences fit into the total concept, i.e., how they develop and cast light on it. The New Testament is a very different document read as a whole. As a collection of sentences virtually any belief can be justified, the prosperity gospel being one bizarre example.

Ethics is almost always bound up with understanding. Poor readers will never have the insight and maturity of those that can understand difficult texts and ideas.

We are in danger of becoming a nation where reading becomes a curiosity. Oh, we’ll be able to read captions under photographs, see how much medicine to take, etc. But the ability to read in the light of our experience, to read in coordination with other reading, other sources, is an art that requires practice and application.

There is today a strange worship of the commonplace, of gut feelings and a casual disdain for the learned. It calls into question the continued development and survival of this civilization.

Of course, if this civilization is nothing more than an acquistive impulse tempered by occasional reservations, reading and thought are of no importance.

But I will continue to believe that there is a civilization here and that it is worth defending.

James Pilant

An Invitation To Write

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I am not the fount of all wisdom. I am well aware of my limitations and there are a lot of them.

I invite you to submit articles or essays or columns that deal with business ethics. I can’t promise to print all of them. Whether I disagree with them or not is not a factor. I will not put up poorly written, or poorly thought out material. I need to maintain a reputation for a certain level of writing. (You might think reading my work that it isn’t very high!) And of course no obscenities and no use of things like the N word, etc.

If you are interested, send an essay or article or write to just ask if a certain topic would be good choice.

southwerk@yahoo.com

By the way, here are the rules, if I print it, your name in full goes in the title at the top of the page. I will write a brief introduction and say nice things about you, then your words. Your words will be highlighted in darkened lettering so people who read the article will be easily able to discern your thoughts as your thoughts and not mine.

Let me repeat, you can disagree with me. That’s not a factor. Writing quality and offensive content is.

James Pilant

What Do I Hope to Get Out of an Ethics Class? (#1) (via Suzysushi’s Blog)

On By southwerkIn ethics

I discovered this thoughtful and personal reflection on ethics. This is ethics from a student perspective from one whose life is in turmoil and wants the class to apply to that turmoil. I like what the writer has to say and want to encourage her to say more. So, please give it a read, and if you are in a generous mood make a comment if only to say, “Good Writing.” Beginning bloggers need to feel some contact out there. Help them along.

I am a little behind in getting my blog going. I have a bunch of unpleasant personal stuff going on, including being laid off a few weeks ago. I think, therefore, my first blog entries are going to be based on more of a personal bent than might be expected. I am in a very strange place emotionally at the moment, and I have been riding a roller coaster of feelings since the start of this year. At this moment, I am both cynical and hopeful — an in … Read More

via Suzysushi's Blog

No Vacation – Keep your job?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure

ABC news reports that many Americans are declining to use their vacation time. Only 57 percent of Americans are taking their full vacation time. And what makes this story even more bizarre, Americans average only 13 days of vacation.

Want to see the numbers?
Italians 42 days
France 37
Canada 26
Japan 25
Korea 25

United States 13 days

How did we get here? Aren’t we supposed to be the richest country on earth? How did Americans wind up with an average of 13 days of vacation and far, far worse, almost half unwilling to use their full time apparently for fear of losing their jobs?

It takes a decoupling of morals from business. When a businessman, when an employer, looks at his workers and says to himself, “That one is using his vacation time. I can do without him,” we have arrived at a bad place.

And yet, where is the outrage (besides mine)? Foreigners in far less wealthy countries give their workers in many cases three times the vacation time of American workers and what’s more they take the time.

“Let’s get rid of the people who work here for fifty weeks a year and take a vacation.” How do you even think like that? What kind of thought process produces that kind of cruel immorality?

It is written: Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.

The King James Bible prescribes better treatment for an ox than that given American workers. The ox gets some share of its labor that could be denied. American workers have no benefits that cannot be denied if even the legal ones put you in danger of being fired.

And I don’t want to hear, “They have to do it to compete.” That’s a nasty age old excuse for any kind of immoral (and often incompetent) act. You could compete better with workers who have no where to go, who don’t get minimum wage or get pregnant or have bad days or get ill or don’t look like other people, etc. Where do you want to stop? You can’t. Talk about slippery slope. If any vile, virtually criminal, act can be justified by the need to compete, there is no bottom standard to stop at, no place of safety, no island of ethics.

You might ask me as a business ethics teacher, what it’s like to teach that subject in a country where taking your vacation days can cost you your job. No fun. It’s preaching against alcoholism in a saloon, safe sex in a Thai brothel, hypocrisy in mega church. In short, it’s hard and it’s not getting any easier. You always think that it’s just got to turn a corner that some limit has been reached and it hasn’t.

James Pilant

Ethics Blog Round Up – 8/7/2010

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism

Chis MacDonald has a new post about “wind turbine hush money.” Sounds like a catchy title to me. It seems that turbines are noisy and complaints could stifle the industry’s growth, so they are paying people what I consider a good amount of money to keep their complaints to themselves. You should read the post.

Lauren Bloom has the second in her series of avoiding workplace law suits. Today’s entry talks about health and safety rules. She discusses the recent mine disaster and mentions NPR’s coverage.

Tone at the top only counts when leaders use words that they believe in enough to live. So says, Gael O’Brien on her blog, This Week In Ethics. She discusses the resignation of Hewlett Packard’s CEO and his violations of HP’s Standards of Business Conduct.

Jonathan Tasini in his Blog, Working Life, has a scathing review of the recent “given pledge.” He’s almost as angry as I am. He discusses the monopolistic practices of these billionaires who made their money on the backs of the workers.

Blaming The Americans!

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure8 Comments

Gary Hart has a post on his web site, Matters of Principle. He talks about his charming and hard working childhood in the bygone world of Ottawa, Kansas. Here’s a quote –

Everyone worked, in my case starting at the age of eleven. (I don’t think there were child labor laws then.) We didn’t spend money we didn’t have. There were no credit cards. And my parents would have been embarrassed to go to the bank and ask for a loan to buy more gadgets. The Depression taught them, and they taught me, don’t go into debt.

Gee, Gary, I’m glad that these Americans with poor judgment can still shape up and we can fix everything if they only start saving and, by the way, acting like you.

Of course, there are some pesky little problems associated with your point of view. The Middle Classes’ desperately slow wage increases over the last 30 years, the explosion of credit cards marketing and every other kind of heavily advertised easy credit, the rising costs of tuition, medical care and host of other necessary expenses. How about the slow grinding pain of America’s manufacturing disappearance and the good jobs that went with it? It’s not gadgets that gets Americans into debt, it’s trying to make ends meet, it’s trying to put food on the table, it’s trying to get through one more month.

It’s a fine thing to talk about personal responsibility when you lived in a time and place without these economic elements, without this kind of pain. Did you know that the average level of unemployment during the 1950’s averaged about 4% and that right now it is 9.5? Bother you any? Maybe every body worked in your happy childhood because they could find a job? It’s a fine time to blame the victims for the economic decline in America over the last thirty years. It is a fine deal when the incredible, amazing failure of this government to stand up for ordinary Americans, does not appear to figure in your fascinating blame game, where the victims are the perpetrators. Yeah, we all committed economic suicide.

Tell me something ole’ buddy, when the stock market went down from its high of 14,000 and demolished the values of pensions and 401k’s all over this great nation, where was the responsibility then? I guess those stupid lazy gadget buying Americans couldn’t be trusted to invest their hard earned money like they were urged to by their government, the business industry and every kind of serious of academic publication. Savings always gets its proper reward.

How dare you. I know these people, the ones that worked for twenty years at a factory that left and went over seas, the people whose medical expenses destroyed their lives, and the unemployed who got nailed by a financial crisis they had nothing to do with.

While you write your comic crap, they suffer.

James Pilant

American Business’ Ethical Collapse

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, Government Failure

But there is yet another factor underlying this crisis that is the broadest of all, pervasive throughout our society today. It was well expressed in a letter I received from a Vanguard shareholder who described the global financial crisis as “a crisis of ethic proportions.” Substituting “ethic” for “epic” is a fine turn of phrase, and it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in our society’s traditional ethical standards.

This is a quote from an article by John C. Bogle. It directly faces the question of the collapse of business ethics and the role in played in the financial melt down of 2008.

Generally speaking, articles dealing with the crisis focus on derivatives, Sallie Mae, the business press, rating agencies, etc. They all share blame and a lot of it. I have always been convinced that the underlying problem was greed, self interest, the corrosive effects of Milton Friedman’s bizarre doctrine of economic utopia, and the replacement of critical scrutiny by frantic cheerleading in the financial press, and I have some more villains to name.

Bogle doesn’t dodge the ethical question. He wonders how we got here and how we can get out. He longs for the day when businessmen understood the value of trust and fair dealing. I’m not surprised to find that Mr. Bogle has no simple solution. It took four decades of worship of the financial means of production of little more than electronic impulses to triumph over the creation of actual goods. This isn’t going to be easy, and it it likely to fail subjecting this country to a chain of financial meltdowns each one of which will severely damage the lives of millions of Americans who will bear the chief cost not only of their way of life but paying for the meltdown themselves out of their “widow’s mite.”

Here’s Bogle discussing his beliefs:

Among those in the know, someone who believes in doing what is right. So, I would pay attention to this gentleman.

James Pilant

Wall Street Looked The Other Way?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure1 Comment

In an article written for the New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson, she discusses what major investment banks did after they discovered that many of their loans were going south.

The answer is brief, they kept the ball rolling. The profits were too good and the risks (for them) were to low for them to back out.

This is a quote from the article citing a remark from Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, as follows -“Our focus has been on the borrower,” she said in an interview last week, “but as we’ve peeled back the onion we’ve gotten the picture of the role Wall Street played through the financing of these loans.”

This is Gretchen Morgenson on a program called “Dialogue.” Here she explains in some depth her views on the financial crisis (28 minutes).

This is capitalism run off the tracks. Greed out weighed simple good judgment. Obvious signs of trouble, not just obvious but certain evidence of approaching disaster, were ignored as money piled up.

The market was supposed to be self regulating. Read a little Milton Friedman. This economic freedom to innovate was supposed to lead to better lives for all Americans, perhaps the whole world. This utopia, this nirvana, has thus far failed to appear. But incomes in a handful of the well placed are measured in the billions.

Justice is not coming. These people are immune to justice. They go to the right churches, have the right friends and are protected by the government while that same government ignores or casts their citizenry away from the door of the statehouse or congress. The people of the United States, the hard working American who lives a moral, ethical life; their goodness counts for nothing. They will have mortgages that will find no help. They will not have jobs and when they can find no work they suffer the slings and arrows of an economic elite that claims they cannot get along with other workers and do not work, that they are lazy. That’s right, Americans, the most productive workers in the world, the ones that work more hours and more days than other workers in the entire world, they are lazy, they can’t get along, they brought this upon themselves.

Right?

James Pilant

Ethics Blog Roundup 7/21/10

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Shel Horowitz is back from vacation with a posting on confronting racism, a topic much in the news.

The Engineering Ethics Blog discusses education and the importance of experience, ability and education in different ways in different times. He is particularly upset with President Obama for his over emphasis on college as opposed to other kinds of learning. There is a lot of societal comment here. I quote:

The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things.

I agree with him pretty much across the board but I am an advocate for education other than just credential education, that is, an education that enriches the many aspects of a person’s life as opposed to simply a note on the wall, a permission slip for employment often with no more intellectual importance than a postage stamp.

Gael O’Brien takes on the ethics of brand identity in the aftermath of so much corporate wrong doing. She points out much more kindly than me that their brand identities of quality and concern for clients were less than real. The article asks more questions than it answers but we as a people and a society will have to answer those questions. As corporations dominate every aspect of our lives, whether or not we have made a deal with concerned people or the devils’s acolytes is one that has to be dealt with.

Chris MacDonald is cruising into philosophical territory with an interview with Andrew Potter about his new book, The Authenticity Hoax. The book’s thesis is that authenticity, the seeking of an identity through consumer purchasing, is based on dubious claims and is inherently self defeating for too often the goal of the authentic is a societal story with little relation to the self but everything to do with the preoccupations of the society around us. The book sounds fascinating.

The Leading In Context Blog discusses green office supplies (something I didn’t know existed).

These gentlemen discuss green office supplies:

James Pilant