BUSINESS ETHICS
PHILOSOPHY 2N03/COMMERCE 2SB3
Term 2

The following is excerpted from an introductory lecture I gave to my two Business Ethics tutorials this semester. Almost all of the students are new to philosophy, and well over half of them are taking the course for credit in Commerce, rather than Philosophy, and will never take another philosophy course again in their lives; so this is my one and only chance to make philosophy relevant to them. I volunteered for this class because I was excited by the challenge of it, of introducing ethics to people who are in an environment where they're discouraged from thinking about problems ethically. Only time will tell whether I've been able to do that, but in the meantime I thought I'd offer this to e2.

In addition to what you see here, my intro lecture also included my contact information, and some instructions and guidelines on how to write an academic paper that is clear, logical, and informed. The students will have two "case study" assignments, where they are given a hypothetical situation and they have to tell me how they would advise their company to act, and to support their reasoning with ethical considerations.

My name is Jeremy, and I'm a second-year Masters student in Philosophy. I'm currently writing a thesis on the political and social philosophy of a seventeenth century thinker named Spinoza. I studied philosophy and English for my undergrad degree, and I've picked up a little bit of economics along the way. I consider myself a "fun-motivated" person rather than a "morally-motivated" person (though I have a pretty weird sense of 'fun' — it involves a lot of studying and writing on abstract topics like philosophy!). I believe the values and meanings of things are something subjective, something to do with how you see things from your own perspective. If you're curious about my personal opinions on law and politics as they pertain to social and moral issues of the sort we'll be talking about in this course, I suppose you could call me a 'left-leaning individualist socialist moderate radical free-market democratic libertarian liberal anarchist'. But what's in a name, right? The point is, I'm not going to get up here and tell you that business people are immoral or bastards, even if they're pursuing profit. I'm just going to try to get you thinking about what 'profit' really means in terms of your life.

ETHICS. We're here to study ethics. The word "ethics" comes from a Greek word, ethos, which means 'conduct', 'habit', 'custom', or, you know, 'way of doing things'. Ethics means thinking critically about your actions — about their motives and their consequences, their meaning and their effects. Okay, so I say "thinking critically": 'critically' means that you can't take your assumptions or preconceptions for granted. You have to ask yourself: What really are my motives? What does it mean about me as a person, that I'm motivated by these things? Are these motives compatible with my other priorities? How do I feel about what I'm doing when I reflect on it, and how am I being looked upon by other people? Whose opinion matters to me, and why, why does it matter? Are there consequences to my actions that I may not have considered? — especially consequences to my own personality, you know? Do I want to be an honest, honorable, spiritual, respectful, or loving person? and are my actions compatible with being the kind of person I want to be? These are the sorts of questions that motivate ethical inquiry. These are the sorts of questions you'll have to face as you try to sort out the issues we'll be discussing in this course.

Let me tell you what the whole point of ethics is all about. The object of ethics is to understand and communicate the terms and conditions necessary for leading a GOOD LIFE. A good life — that means basically a happy, satisfying personal existence. Now, the object of business is a little different, right, a little more restricted. The object of business is to make some kind of income (it's almost always a money income) in some kind of productive activity in a certain social context. But making an income isn't all there is to living a good life; not all the ways we could pursue productive activity are compatible with a good life. So human beings pursuing industry and commerce for a living, they have to be prepared to make choices, sometimes renouncing an apparent opportunity to make a buck, if it puts other priorities at risk. Those other priorities might be material, cultural, personal, familial, or religious. Ethics is definitely concerned with PROFIT, if we understand that to mean the gains we make by our actions considered against the losses we suffer. But ethics is concerned with gains and losses that can't necessarily be expressed in terms of money revenues and expenditures. It requires that you consider gains and losses to your emotions, to your character, and to your spirit.

Now, we're not going to answer the big questions or solve the big problems for you in this course. You'll have to do that for yourself, and if you're sincere about it then you'll spend your whole life doing it. Also, you know, we aren't going to teach you how to make excuses for yourself when you do business; we aren't going to teach you how to manipulate how other people perceive you or your actions. That isn't philosophy; that's something else, that's something called "sophistry". In philosophy, we've got to be honest and sincere; those are the preconditions of being able to do philosophy at all. Our goal in this course is to encourage you to think ethically, and to build the skills and habits that allow you to articulate your own ethical perspective, and to take advantage of others' perspectives in the context of business.