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The Ethics of Social Responsibility

What is business ethics? “It’s casuistry.”

What is business ethics? “It’s casuistry,” the historian of Western philosophy would answer. Casuistry asserted that rulers, because of their responsibility, have to strike a balance between the ordinary demands of ethics that apply to them as individuals and their social responsibility to their kingdom. But this implies that the rules that decide what is ethical for ordinary people do not apply equally, if at all, to those with social responsibility. Ethics for them is instead a cost-benefit calculation involving the demands of individual conscience and the demands of position—and that means that the rulers are exempt for the demands of ethics, if only their behavior can be argued to confer benefits on other people.

A great horror story of business ethics would, to the casuist, appear as an example of business virtue if not of unselfish business martyrdom. In the “electrical apparatus conspiracy” of the late 1950s, several high-ranking General Electric executives were sent to jail. They were found guilty of a criminal conspiracy in violation of antitrust because orders for heavy generating equipment, such as turbines, were parceled out among the three electrical apparatus manufacturers in the United States—General Electric, Westinghouse, and Allis Chalmers. The purpose of the cartel was the protection of the weakest and most dependent of the companies, Allis Chalmers. As soon as government action destroyed the cartel, Allis Chalmers had to go out of the turbine business and had to lay off several thousand people.

ACTION POINT: Document two decisions in your career where casuistry has been the basis of the ethics behind these decisions. What decisions should have been made in these cases?

The Ecological Vision

* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker

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