I want to make a simple point just for the record...
Compliance (a.k.a. “Business Ethics”) is not Ethics.
As far as I'm concerned...
ethics is to compliance as
bunny is to chocolate bunny.
To me, ethics is an exercise in self-restraint. It looks at things that are legal and still asks the question, “Even though I'm allowed, maybe I shouldn't do it anyway?”
By contrast, compliance is an exercise in manifest destiny. Businesses decide they're determined to do something and then assign someone, usually a lawyer or someone they flatter by calling an “ethicist,” to find any rationale, however thin, that explains why the thing they are already bound and determined to do should be seen as legal, so they don't have to slow down or ask permission before proceeding.
These are not the same.
I recommend never using the term “business ethics” when speaking of corporate decision-making. Always say “compliance.”
Additional Thoughts
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There are deep reasons for believing that corporations are not even capable of ethics. To understand those, see my essay Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics. Once you've got that foundation, you're well positioned to understand the dance I call Technology's Ethical Two-Step.
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I owe a whole essay on the topic of ethics and ethicists. Since I've not written that yet, I'll just say that to me, ethics is a hygiene, not a credential. I'm not sure anyone should wear the label, but especially not those doing compliance. I'd love to have a job doing real ethics for a company, but I'd have trouble with the title “ethicist.”
I often say of myself “I aspire to be ethical” because saying I am ethical seems a little too much like I'm confused into thinking I'm there. It makes me cringe.
I would make analogy to alcoholism, where people say they are sober, not that they are no longer alcoholic. Or to the Catholic church, where everyone is just assumed to be a sinner who keeps trying, rather than ever declaring themselves to be without sin.
To me, the biggest danger sign of being in ethical danger is believing that one is ethical. And even if I thought I had somehow gotten there, I would insist on starting each day asking “Am I still ethical?”
Author’s Notes:
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For other posts by me on ethics, click here.
The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8, GPT Image 2.5 and GPT Image 2.5 [Edit], which is apparently not the same). Light post-processing was done in Gimp to crop and optimize the resulting image as a .jpg for faster web download,
Yes.
ReplyDeleteGroucho Marx quipped that military intelligence is to intelligence as military music is to music (if I recall the attribution correctly).
That seems to tell us something about the relation between business ethics and ethics.
Seriously, I think yet another take on this is that the relation between ethics and compliance is like the relation between social norms and laws.
Neither is a substitute for the other.
The latter relation is (or used to be) a significant research area in social psychology, but, regrettably, I haven't followed that for way too long.
I also recall how the protagonist of O. Henry's The Roads We Take is fully compliant with the law.
(This is the short story where the key phrase is "Bolivar cannot carry double".)
Yes, I do not mean to say Compliance has no place. We write laws to say they should be complied with. And I take the criticism here that I am being a little narrow about what compliance is. But even in an expanded view, it is not ethics. That's my key point. I appreciate you creating a context that allows me to clarify that.
ReplyDeleteAnd indeed when I speak here of what ethics is and is not, I am using my own personal definition of ethics. It's fair to debate what ethics means. I'll do that elsewhere, another day. There's only so much that fits crisply in a post. So many of my essays run long that I was thrilled I could factor this little bit of thought out in modular fashion. The world is a web of such things, and what Kripke called 'contingent truth' abounds.
My goal is not to say everyone must think like me. Rather, to say this is why I think this way, and I believe it to be somewhat coherent. But the coherence is dependent on other things I think, not necessarily on aligning with other things others think. That's true of everyone, I think. There is an intrinsic loneliness to existence, which we use language to ameliorate. Language is a poor tool sometimes. But it's what we've got. To paraphrase I think the US Supreme Court, badly out of context, the best fix for bad speech is usually more speech. We may be societally testing the limits of that lately...