Ethics Drive Political Choices and Economic Consequences

We live today in a culture that holds a high regard for people and institutions that claim that they have little or no self-interest, for people and institutions who claim to place the value of the interests of others ahead of their own. The leading institution vying for this supposed exalted position is government, which is believed to be inherently and intrinsically virtuous. A considerable portion of the population holds that for the most part government is a positive force in the lives of individuals and is a helpful and benevolent force in society. Every politician campaigns on promises of how they will spend billions of dollars doing good deeds, deeds that are deemed to be either more virtuous or will produce better results than otherwise would exist. 

Citizens may disagree about the nuances of how these billions or trillions of dollars are spent, but very few disagree that government taxation and spending of this money is ethically virtuous because it creates greater good for greater numbers than would otherwise be the case if individuals were left free to function in the peaceful pursuit of their own self-interested ends. The response of voters, as indicated by their insatiable demands for ever more government spending and intervention in economic affairs, seems to support the inference that there is a strong positive correlation between government spending and government virtue. It is not surprising, then, that many people with a desire to focus their work in the pursuit of virtuous ends see virtue in pursuing careers in government and related social institutions that receive government funds. 

By implication, many such people value government work above profit-oriented private sector work because they perceive such "social" work as morally superior. Not all government and social sector workers hold this viewpoint. A vast majority of these workers are likely looking to use their skills in well-paying jobs with good benefits, whether they be in the private or public sector. 

Still, there is a large segment of the population that has an ideological preference for government work; who value being on a government payroll above other private sector employment alternatives; who sincerely believe that government work is noble, patriotic, self-fulfilling, giving. Many believe that government work, by definition, is not tainted with the unsavory scent of pursuit of profit and thus not exploitative and self-serving; that government serves a higher cause than does business. It is common these days to run across experienced executives that retire or lose their private sector jobs and then seek senior government roles as a way to 'give back' to society. The language they use is interesting because 'giving back' implies that they have taken something or have benefitted in some way that entailed the commitment of unjust acts; that penance is being paid for years spent pursuing profits through productive wealth creation in the service of consumers; that government employment is 'good' work and can cleanse the guilt of years spent doing 'bad' work; that government work to serve citizens is morally superior to private sector productive work that serves the well-being of those same citizens. 

There are fundamental differences between private sector 'for-profit' and government 'for-loss' activities. 

Private sector exchange is necessarily voluntary, and in voluntary exchange, both parties to the trade perceive net benefits from the exchange. Private sector production requires the creation of wealth in that goods or services are created from economic inputs, exchanged, and the proceeds are reinvested in further productivity. This cycle of production and exchange is the process of wealth creation, from which all members of society benefit.  

Government, on the other hand, doesn't create wealth. In a free-market society, the government is not in the business of economic production. In fact, the existence of government is parasitical on the wealth created in the private sector. Where the private sector engages in the production of wealth, government engages in the consumption of wealth. Governments have two ways to obtain the wealth it needs to operate. It can convince citizens that they should voluntarily provide support to government in exchange for those services that it is proper for governments to provide, such as the protection of individual rights and property rights through the provision of police, courts and armies. Alternatively, those individuals who are elected and work as representatives of the elected can actively repudiate the moral requirement for upholding individual rights by initiating the use of force to confiscate the wealth of others in the form of taxes or duties in support of those activities they believe they have the moral authority to carry out. Such individuals in government (or the institution of government itself) assert legal authority as an extension of their purported moral authority. 

Those in favour of government's initiation of force hold as a premise that it is ethical in principle to initiate the use of force as a means to confiscate the wealth of others to serve ends to which those who are forced to pay for them have not granted their voluntary consent. They are opposed as a matter of principle to the idea that voluntary exchange between consenting individuals is a fundamental requirement of civilized society. They hold that civilization requires human sacrifice, set out to define who and how much gets sacrificed by some to benefit others, and then set out to enforce the command mechanisms they put in place.  

 

Most people don't think about the differences between the private sector and the government in these terms because they divorce ethics from politics. There are many people who truly want to do good for others and believe that they are doing so when they enter into government work. They see government as a multiplication mechanism for their good deeds by forcing people to contribute en mass and on a grand scale, that is, by making the "unenlightened" multitudes do good against their will "for their own good and the good of others." Because the government is the only institution with the legal right to initiate the use of force, government becomes a magnet for those who believe that the initiation of force is a virtue. In ethics, such people are known as altruists, and proclaim that virtue consists in doing good for others through personal sacrifice. 

Philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, in defending the ethics of Christianity, argued that only actions undertaken as a pure duty to a higher cause than man, in which the actor was precluded from any psychological or materialistic benefit whatsoever, could count as being moral. From this comes the widely accepted modern ideal that ethical action precludes any personal gain, or self-interest, or pursuit of valued or desired ends or results, and therefore requires personal sacrifice. As demonstrated by Ayn Rand in her essay "Causality Versus Duty" in Philosophy: Who Needs It, this altruistic concept of ethics is at root anti-man and anti-life. To survive and prosper, individuals must identify and pursue values that promote the pursuit of the values that life requires of man qua man, not identify those value and then require that ethics demands their sacrifice. Such a sacrifice of life-promoting values is demonstrably irrational and life-destroying. Altruism sets man against himself by requiring the destruction of the very values that life requires in the name of being moral. Ethical altruism is, in fact, an inversion of morality.

Tara Smith, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, summarizes the concept of altruism amongst today's contemporary philosophers in her recent book Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. She writes:   

Altruism calls for the sacrifice to others. This has been the standard conception since [Auguste] Compte coined the term – which literally means "other-ism" – in the mid-nineteenth century. E.J. Bond characterizes altruism as the policy of "always denying oneself for the sake of others." Burton Porter presents altruism as "the position that one should always act for the welfare of others. While recognizing that the term can be used more and less strictly, Lawrence Blum observes that in its most prevalent usage, altruism refers to placing the interests of others ahead of one's own. This is clearly how Rand understood altruism. She describes it as the thesis that self-sacrifice is a person's highest moral duty. [Leonard] Peikoff stresses that altruism is not a synonym for kindness, generosity, or good will, but the "doctrine that man should place others above self as the fundamental rule of life." A sacrifice must not be confused with an investment, in which a person forgoes a nearer reward in expectation of a greater one later. A sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for a lesser one or for something that one does not want at all. (P.p. 38-39).

When extended into the realm of politics, altruism moves beyond an edict of the virtue of self-sacrifice to proclaim the virtue of the sacrifice of others! Most Westerners understand at least somewhat the logic of reciprocity of the enlightened concept of individual rights, upon which modern Western civilization was founded and upon which the United States was created. Reciprocity requires that we leave other persons free from the initiation of force and fraud to pursue their own ends in return for the reciprocal right. Rights are a mechanism to prevent the injustice of allowing some persons to go around taking things that don't belong to them away from others, things that they have no moral entitlement (right) to. 

When it comes to the government, its primary purpose is to use force in defense of individual rights by ensuring that the rights of its citizens are protected. What differentiates government in kind from non-government institutions is that it maintains a legal monopoly through the police and army to use force. Ethical principles are principles derived from reality and are applicable to all people. There isn't one set of ethical principles for people who earn their living in the private sector and one for those who earn their living working for government. It is equally unethical for all people to initiate the use of force against others, whether they are employed in the private sector and paid by the owners of the means of production, or whether they are employed by governments and paid by taxes taken from the governed. Proper laws founded on moral principles and consistent with the virtue of justice would require governments and their representatives to operate in ways that take individual rights seriously by ensuring that they do not engage in actions that require, condone, or encourage the initiation of the use of force. 

When armed with the ethics of altruism (where duty and sacrifice form the foundations for virtue), men and women that pursue and assume the role of governing (be they elected politicians or government employees), too often relish the fact that because they are now part of the governing clique, they are anointed with the moral authority to initiate the use of force against others. If they ascribe in any way to the altruist code of ethics they will self-righteously insist that they have an ethical duty to enforce the sacrifice of others to create virtue. In this way, modern government does not perceive its proper role as it should be, namely as a protector of individual rights and freedoms. Rather, it sees itself as, and therefore becomes, an altruistic force for "virtue" by requiring the sacrifice of the values of its citizens in order to create a so-called greater moral good. When the pursuit of self-interest is deemed to be intrinsically unethical or evil, then the suppression or punishment of self-interest – the imposition of duty – is deemed to be intrinsically virtuous and good. 

From the altruist's twisted view of morality, what could be more important work than ensuring that individuals behave in ways that best serve "society." Therefore, what we see all around us, including by the elected representatives of the U.S. Congress and Senate, who are expressly prohibited by the Constitution from depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, is the rush to impose the force of government to demonize and destroy the last fading remnants of a marketplace free of government controls. From an ethical perspective, what we are witnessing today is a full and willful frontal assault against individuals who try to act on the basis of the conclusions reached by their own minds in pursuit of the values they have determined their life and happiness requires. This plays out politically in the government's increasingly explicit political rejection of individual rights and freedom, the very things that governments have a moral obligation to protect and that defines their moral purpose. 

What we are witnessing playing out today is an altruistic crusade in favour of "sacrificial duty" led by the President of the United States, while throngs of the altruist-educated masses are cheering him on and unwittingly clearing the road toward civilization's destruction. The President believes that he possesses the cognitive intelligence to lead the United States and world to prosperity; that he and those who work for him in government know what's best for each of us and will therefore assume control of finance and industry, or land, labour and capital. 

In his first 100 days, the President has assumed control of a vast proportion of private property via its takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He has initiated government control of a vast proportion of the banking sector. He has wrested away private control of most of the U.S. auto sector in order to give it to others. He has overstepped the bounds of moral and legal propriety to force his will upon leaders of business and industry, while leaving the whims of fellow politicians and bureaucrats largely unchallenged and unrestrained. Through unprecedented spending, he leads the borrowing and consumption of the wealth of future generations of Americans. F.A. Hayek, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, called such thinking a "fatal conceit" and warned that the pursuit of such a centrally controlled society would inevitably lead us along the "road to serfdom."

While all of this is a question of politics, it is more fundamentally a question of ethics and philosophy. Those who still believe in the validity of ethical relativism and that economics is value-free, and therefore anything goes, should be checking their premises. All the while smiling, I fear that the President of the United States is leading the civilized world rapidly towards the eve of destruction as he adopts fascist tactics to achieve his fanciful whims. There is a clear and frightful trend of governmental delusion and psychosis afoot.

Consider just these two recent stories as representative of many more in recent weeks that indicate a complete disregard by politicians and government employees for both the rights of individuals and for the law. 

From The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2009: "U.S. to Condemn Land for Flight 93 Memorial." The National Park Service has announced that it will "begin taking land" from seven property owners so that a 2,200 acre park can be build as a memorial to the victims of Flight 93 in time for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. To obtain the land, the government will declare it condemned, thereby setting the stage for its confiscation against the will of the current owners. 

From the Washington Post, April 30, "Obama Blames Lenders for Pushing Chrysler Into Bankruptcy." Apparently, the Obama administration tried to muscle secured lenders from enacting their legal rights under the law. As a result of secured lenders trying to abide by the rule of law rather than give in to government coercion to forgo their legal rights, the administration indicated their disapproval and disappointment, expressing that the secured creditors had failed to do the right thing by failing to act "in the national interest." President Obama stated, "I don't stand with those who held out while others made sacrifices." It is clear from the structuring of the bankruptcy that the government will maintain control over the board of the new Chrysler along with the UAW. "Upon successful completion of the alliance, a board of directors for Chrysler will be appointed by the U.S. government and Fiat," Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli wrote to his employees. "The majority of the directors will be independent (not employees of Chrysler or Fiat)."

If you are worried about the current state of the world and perceive the impending decline of Western civilization in current social trends (including this one), the best source for understanding from a philosophic perspective is Ayn Rand's monumental 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Read it, discuss it, learn from it. Even her detractors are now calling her work prophetic, and are unable to provide a valid counter-argument. For an excellent synopsis of Atlas Shrugged and Rand's argument for the virtue of ethical egoism and the vice of ethical altruism, see Craig Biddle's essay "Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's Morality of Egoism" in The Objective Standard. 

Economist extraordinaire George Reisman has written an excellent article in two parts that he published on his blog explaining the current causes of and solutions to the economic crisis: "Economic Recovery Requires Capital Accumulation Not Government 'Stimulus Packages'".While the root of our current crisis is philosophical and ethical, a basic understanding of economic principles is crucial to understanding why the government's response is irrational and only making matters worse. You owe it to yourself to take the time to carefully read this article, and all of his writings.

A recent article by Peter Foster in Canada's The Financial Post, "Trading Honesty for 'social responsibility'" touches on the connection between ethics, economics and politics.

If you want to read an excellent book that explains the economic and political factors driving the current economic crises, Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s New York Times Bestselling book "Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse" is easy and important reading. 

Also, download the lecture "Why Was Anyone Surprise by the Crash?" by investor and authorPeter Schiff and laugh until you cry at how America's politicians are willfully and self-righteously pursuing their altruistic premises and thereby destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and lying to themselves and everyone else about who's at fault. Schiff speaks about the current economic situation in economic terms, not moral terms. The key virtue of Schiff is his ability to present the key economic concepts discussed by each of the authors above in an easy-to-understand and entertaining manner. He ought to be a little more outraged at the blatant injustice being perpetrated on innocent victims by our Lords of Looting and Kings of (Wealth) Consumption, i.e., our politicians and their bureaucratic cronies, in my opinion. 

Finally, the economic arguments that Schiff brings to the independent inquiring mind on TV and his webcasts are not new. If you want to go to the source, discover and read the works of the 20th Century's greatest economist, Ludwig von Mises. For a concise summary of his explanation of the 1930's crisis, written in 1931 but still valid for today, read his essay "The Causes of the Economic Crisis" available from the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

It is important to make the time to hear and heed the analysis of the above authors and to prepare yourself for the coming consequences. Ideas have consequences and mistaken ideas, or worse, evil ideas, are assured to produce value-destroying consequences. These value-destroying consequences are being unleashed on us in cascading waves day-after-day, and we will continue to suffer the assault, whether we like it or not, whether we approve of it or not. It will continue until the conceited altruists relinquish the notion that values can be gained through force, and forgo the absurd idea that there is intrinsic virtue in the unleashing of government sanctioned coercion in a moral crusade to clip the wings of freedom and overthrow the self-interest of individuals and inalienable individual rights. 

The ultimate answer is not a better understanding of economics, although this is desperately needed today. It is more fundamental: a better understanding of proper philosophy.

Walt Disney: Iconoclast

My article Think Like An Iconoclast: The Principles of Walt Disney's Success has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of Rotman Magazine, the widely acclaimed and award-winning magazine from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. 

I have done extensive research on Walt Disney to identify some of the key traits that contributed to his success as one of the top 20 "Builders and Titans of the 20th Century" and innovator who changed the way the world works, according to Time Magazine. These traits are summarized in my article, which is a severe condensation of a longer essay "Walt Disney and His Business Philosophy in Action" available here.

Whatever the reason, Walt had an extraordinary mental capacity and collection of traits that allowed him to dream of, and create solutions that others valued. It was not uncommon for those who knew him to describe him as a visionary, a dreamer, a genius.

Taking all of that as a given, the key to his success, without which any of his achievements would have borne fruit, was his commitment to living life ethically through what he would have called a commitment to good ol' American common-sense. Having never completed high school, Walt was a curious, caring and learned man, but not a sophisticated or ostentatious man. While he is probably recognized as the world's most well-known dreamer, he was also very practical, with a deep commitment to an implicit philosophy rooted in reality and reason, and a sense of pro-life values linked to virtues that support man as a heroic being capable of achieving his proper goal: happiness. "Life should be a World's Fair of delights," Walt once said. "I know that life isn't, but I think it should be, I believe it could be, and hope it will be." 

It's not surprising that he traversed a road that started with drawing illustrations and simple pencil-sketch cartoons and ended up imagining, designing, and building Disneyland and Walt Disney World. More than 40 years after his death in 1966, at age 65, these immense and complex businesses and tourist destinations are still held up as the pinnacle of service excellence and described by visitors as "the happiest place on earth."

Walt Disney built his empire on the foundation of his personal values. Those values and principles hold the secret to what is known colloquially as 'The Disney Way'. His brother and business partner, Roy Disney, summed up his and Walt's perspective on taking moral values seriously: "When your values are clear to you, making decisions become easier. It is never really easy, but I think when your values are in order, the process is easier." As the Disney Brothers demonstrated, that's a quote you can take to the bank!

Walt dedicated his life to the creation of happiness, joy, and wish-fulfillment. His legacy is a monument to his success.

I extend my sincere thanks to Didier Ghez for his enthusiasm in posting a link to Think Like An Iconoclast on his Disney History blog. Didier is the editor of the excellent and historically important Walt's People series of books. The seven volumes published so far contain hundreds of rare interviews with former Disney artists about their reflections on Walt and the pioneering work that they were involved with. It is fascinating and required reading for all Disney history buffs. 

Goldmansachs Head Revealed!

I just loved parts of Peggy Noonan's editorial in the Wall Street Journal today ("Look At The Time"), especially her identification of the dreaded Goldmansachs Head. The article doesn't have much to do with business ethics per se – because the affliction is not limited to people in business. Politicians tend to be chronically inflicted. 

She writes:

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head.... When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party's never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef. Goldmansachs Head is Bernie Madoff complaining he's feeling cooped up in the penthouse. It is the delusion that the old days continue and the old ways prevail and you, Prince of Abundance, can just keep rolling along. Here is how you know if someone has GSH: He has everything but a watch. He doesn't know what time it is....

But you don't have to be on Wall Street to have GSH. Congress has it too. That's what the stimulus bill was about–not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn't mean you're a pro, it doesn't mean your a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you're a slob.

That's how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis.

Well said. 

Unfortunately, whether it was that bill or another somehow "more sensible" bill, it is still highly unethical for members of congress and the senate to initiate the use of force against others. 

Too bad there isn't more talk about the need for government ethics, and less business scapegoating from the President of the United States and others.

Legal Doesn't Always Mean Ethical

It goes without saying that what is legal is not always ethical. 

A proper legal system would be built upon valid ethical principles so that there was complete correspondence between the legal and the ethical. When people accept ethical subjectivism as valid, they have no means at their disposal to assess the validity of laws because they implicitly or explicitly rejected the notion of universal principles.

In a proper philosophical hierarchy, ethics comes before politics. Out of a scientific ethics derived from the facts of reality comes the concept of natural rights and natural law - namely the identification of legal principles to enforce social behaviour that are derived from ethical principles and the moral rights of individuals. From this perspective, the primary purpose of law is to protect individual rights.

Most people, however, when thinking about social issues, don't consider ethics at all. They begin with politics, i.e., the law, and then move backwards to make ethical judgments. This process reverses the proper method and makes ethics subordinate to politics. The inevitable result of this methodology is that it leaves no way to pass ethical judgment on political issues. It results in a political and social system that embraces the initiation of physical force as a legitimate technique to achieve desired social ends. This is the political system that the world is floundering in today - a system that is systemically unethical because it fully repudiates the validity of natural law and natural rights.

I recently came across an excellent article that touches on this subject by John Stossel, ABC News "20/20" co-anchor and author, that discusses the political from an ethical perspective, with the great title The Scandal Is What's Legal. 

There are a couple of memorable lines in the article. 

The first is from H.L. Menken: "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." 

The second relates to the unethical means adopted by politicians and their bureaucratic support networks and the fundamental difference between them and the rest of us. For the rest of us, the initiation of the use of force is deemed to be unlawful and unethical. But the heart and soul of modern statist government depends on the negation of this principle because the use of force is at the heart of its mission to serve the people. Stossel writes: "Politicians, bureaucrats and the people they 'rescue' get money through force – taxation. Don't think taxation is force? Try not paying, and see what happens."

The initiation of force is the antithesis of freedom, and of ethical behaviour. 

With so much talk in the press about "business ethics" and the supposed lack thereof, one can only wonder why there is so little talk of "government ethics" and of holding politicians and government leaders to the same high standards of ethical accountability that they demand of others. Perhaps they think that ethical behaviour among those engaged in honest and voluntary trade is expected, while they expect others to recognize, as they themselves do, that there is no hypocrisy in the lack of ethical behaviour amongst today's breed of politician. Their plundering and destruction of the wealth of others is, after all, perfectly legal. 

Do We Need An Economic Bill of Rights?

The Harvard Business Review Advisory Council Forum initiated an online discussion for members to respond to the general question: "How would you advise Obama on his business agenda priorities." I participated in a thread in response to the question: "Do we need an economic Bill of Rights?"

Given that individuals already have moral rights that governments can neither legitimately grant nor take away, I hold to the position that we have economic rights as a corollary of the rights we each possess as rational human beings. If an "Economic Bill of Rights" is a reiteration of universal moral rights, the purpose of which is to reinforce these already existing rights, then I'm all for the creation of an Economic Bill of Rights. But if an "Economic Bill of Rights" requires the repudiation of universal moral rights through the legitimization of the initiation of the use of force by some to gain unearned/un-permissioned access to the property and wealth of others, then I'm against it. As should be all civilized people. 

My take on the context by which the question was framed is that an Obama-led Economic Bill of Rights is one about repudiating the concept of individual rights and implementing a government-led initiative of wealth redistribution in support of the Marxist slogan: from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.

Here are the pertinent parts of my contribution to the thread and to the comments by others.

KM: November 18, 2008: 

We need to examine the meaning of work and the ethics regarding operating a business. Investment in the economic backbone is paramount and should be simplified and anchored on key principals of character, responsibility and accountability. It needs to start with an examination of fiscal fundamentals of supply-demand, resource availability and domestic and global integration and protections as well as currency management.

Linetsky: November 18, 2008:

Peter Drucker wrote that the purpose of a business is to create customers. To do that requires an entrepreneur to organize resources in a manner that can create more value than the sum of the parts as determined by consumers. That's where any economic bill of rights has to start. Those who are able to win customers in a free market acquire wealth and earn the right to continue to control capital. Those that fail lose wealth, go out of business, and capital is transferred to others who think they can do a better job at satisfying consumers. Those with the foresight, ability, or luck to work for value-creators and contribute to satisfying consumers are gainfully employed. Those who work for companies that create products or services customers do not desire lose their jobs. Beyond abiding by economic laws of the marketplace, I'm not sure what other economic rights there are to talk about, unless you mean the right to produce things people don't want and still get rewarded for it. But that can only be achieved through unethical government intervention in the free market. Please explain what kind of ethical economic bill of rights you are considering.

AP: November 19, 2008:

In response to linetsky, I would suggest that you are not actually talking about rights. A company's ability to capture customers by providing them with what they value is one of the determinants of company success in a market economy. Unfortunately, there can be other determinants (at least temporarily): contracts, government favourtism/unregulated lobbying/corruption, manipulating perception of risk, exploiting supply chains... Basing the economic system merely on criteria of monetary success leaves the system vulnerable to practices that promote individual success at the cost of systemic sustainability. If we believe in a society built on mutual dependence and progress (as opposed to the law of the jungle), then we need to recognise that businesses have acquired a role beyond profit generation. In a capitalist democracy, businesses are one of the fundamental units that channel our social interaction, our effort to form and realise aspirations and our sense of place in society.

How we choose to regulate and value the operation of a business has fundamental implications for the society we wish to live in. Whether an economic bill of rights is the best way to progress or not, a serious reflection on these questions is a damn good idea.

Linetsky: November 20, 2008:

Antony and I come together and agree to build widgets that cost us five dollars to make.

We find a buyer who is thrilled about our Widgets and she agrees to pay us $20 per Widget if we can provide 1,000 of a specified quality by a specified date.

With a sale pending, we form a business.

We hire Antony's friend who agrees to help us for a specified wage.

We fulfill the order as promised and get paid as promised. We pay our employee and share a portion of the profits as we agreed when forming the company.

We get another order and then another.

What I don't understand, which Antony implies in his comment, is how (or why he thinks that) he and I, by the fact that we have come together and voluntarily created a business and pooled our thinking and our efforts to create new wealth, have somehow "acquired a role beyond profit generation." Why have we acquired a role that doesn't exist for every other member of society? I don't understand what "role we have acquired by virtue of our serving customers. I don't understand who "we" is in the assertion "how we choose to regulate and value the operation of a business has fundamental implications for the society we wish to live in." I don't see why, in this case, Antony, me, his friend, and the customer needs a "we" to regulate our voluntary interaction. Clearly the regulation would not be voluntary.

Why is this a matter of rights? Because I am asserting that Antony and I have the right to engage in the use of our property in the way I described because we have the right to own property and transact with that property without the permission of some "higher" authority.

A right is a moral principle that protects the freedom of each individual from the interference of others. Rights are a moral sanction that prohibits the initiation of the use of force (or fraud) by one person against another. The legitimate role of government is to protect each citizen's rights, not to arbitrarily deny individual rights by substituting coercive "legal" rights, which is all a government created "economic" bill of rights could amount to.

If someone else has the right to decide how we must use our property, or to determine what is proper or improper use of our property (whether or not we have permission to make Widgets, how many we are allowed to make, how much we must charge for them, how many employees we have to hire and where they must live, etc.), then we are deluding ourselves to think that the capital we bring to the business - including our own independent thinking - belongs to those who bring it forward. By right, it must belong to the regulators, in this case disguised as "we."

An "economic bill of rights" must result in the property of some being looted to serve the needs of others. An "economic bill of rights" must, by definition, enshrine injustice as a moral virtue.

If this is not what we are talking about when we are seriously talking about "economic" rights, then what is it we are talking about?

ID: November 20, 2008:

An economic Bill of Rights is a very important initiative for the new legislature to consider for implementation given the current economic downturn and rescue bailouts that are in consideration. We can take a lesson from healthcare who has operated with a patient bill of rights for a very long time. A bill of rights offers guidance and establishes the expectations of conducting business and meeting the needs of the consumer. It is very unfortunate that the lack of oversight on the operations of many of the firms who declared bankruptcy, have led the country into a recession. This is mostly attributed to a lack of ethical business behavior. An economic bill of rights would provide the framework and guidance that is required to establish and allow ethical business behavior to occur. In addition, the leadership will be able to identify the boundaries of ethical business operations.

Linetsky: November 21, 2008:

I would argue, as other have, that it is government interference in the market - let's call it a policy of interventionism rather than socialism - both in terms of regulation, veiled political threats by congressmen and senators, and monetary policy including fractional reserve banking, that has led to this crisis. It has a lot to do with a lack of ethical political behavior that attempts to deny the fundamental laws and principles of sound ethics and economics. It has almost nothing to do with "a lack of ethical behavior."

To paraphrase Idiaz2, what is needed is a citizen's bill of rights that would provide the framework and guidance that is required to establish and allow ethical business behavior to occur without the unethical injection of political interference in the economy and intervention in free trade among consenting adults. If that happened, business leaders everywhere will be able to identify the boundaries of ethical business operations and not have to worry about unjustifiable political interference for the benefit of some at the expense of others.

There's nothing ethical in [business leaders] begging politicians to confiscate the income of other people [for the purpose of giving] it to them. Even if you call it a wealth transfer, it is still looting, and is the very opposite of justice. I would like to see an "Economic Bill of Rights" that is consistent with the basic moral principle of justice. If it can't be done, then you must decide whether the principle of justice is worth giving up, and what principle you are substituting in its place.

As business people, let's get focused on real issues of freedom and the creation of wealth to improve society instead of rehashed Marxist rhetoric and psychological envy. As business leaders, let's not on the one hand talk as if we believe that being "market-focused" is a good thing because businesses can only succeed if they fulfill a market demand, and on the other hand advocate moral and political principles that encourage the destruction of the very concept of a market.

POSTSCRIPT (December 2008):

I'm happy to note that I was able to elicit at least one response in my favour. One participant wrote in part: "In the end we need to make money, and I would propose an Ethical Bill of Rights over an Economic Bill of Rights. We have enough government regulations in business already from EPA, to Human Resources, so why add another wrinkle into the overall process?"

An "ethical bill of rights"...I like the ring to that. It can start with Ayn Rand's credo spoken by the character John Galt in her novel Atlas Shrugged: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

An Economic Bill of Rights, on the other hand, would likely be appropriately prefaced with another of Rand's credos, this one from her dystopian novel Anthem. Rand's protagonist, Equality 7-2521 speaks: "Over the Palace of the World council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted. 'We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but the great WE, One, indivisible and forever.'"

If you had to choose one of the two credo's as the basis for the principles by which to live your life, which credo would you choose?

Which do you think President-elect Obama would choose to guide an "Economic Bill of Rights"? 

What Is 'Business Ethics'?

Copyright © 2008, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

There is a lot of confusion amongst those who write about business ethics about what the topic subsumes beyond the obvious fact that business ethics has to do with business and ethics. Given how many people speak and write about the topic, you’d think that there would be clarity about what it is they are talking about. Yet it is rare to find a definition of business ethics by those who talk about it and even write books about it! They just assume that when they talk about business ethics, everybody knows what they are talking about. Authors that provide a definition of business ethics are rare. I contend that this is because most of them aren’t really talking about business ethics in the first place.

So, what then is business ethics? Let me put my stake in the ground.

What Is Business?

“Business” can be one of two things, depending on whether it is used as a noun or a verb. It can be an entity or an activity.

As an entity, a business is an organization of people and resources organized to engage in commerce or trade through buying and selling or providing a service or services as an ongoing concern to derive a profit. As an activity, it is the engagement in commerce or trade by means of organized people and resources buying and selling or providing a service or services as an ongoing concern to derive a profit.

Thus, whether “business” refers to the organization or to the actions performed by its people, each is inherent in and inseparable from the other. (See my earlier blog “What Is Business? It’s Not Obvious To Many” .)

If an organization does not fit this definition, then it’s unlikely to be a business. By this definition, hobbies, not-for-profits, and governments and their agencies are not businesses, although they may engage in and manage very delineated operations using the methodologies of business. Organizations under private ownership but operating under government protection from competition (airlines or media companies in Canada, for example) or under regulation that ensures profitability (most utilities) would fit the definition.

A business serves a specific purpose; it has a specific function. Its purpose is to create something that is perceived by consumers to be of value for which they will pay a price that exceeds its cost. In a free market, businesses compete with each other to win sales from customers. As a general rule, they compete to provide the most value at the lowest production cost to achieve that value, and to sell at a price that achieves a desired level of total profit.

So, this is what a business is and what a business does.

There are two ways to judge business: from outside or from inside this context.

To reject business from the outside is to assert that the institution of business is illegitimate or evil. As irrational as it is, this viewpoint is very common today. Karl Marx is alive and well amongst business critics who proclaim that all profits are illegitimate; that profit by definition entails exploitation of consumers by charging them more than is justified. Others criticize profit not from an ideological perspective or from ignorance of economic laws, but rather from a particular perspective on human nature and man’s natural proclivity for greed, power-lust, and stupidity. These people hold that producers have unlimited power over consumers and thereby scheme to bamboozle and rip people off so as to get rich quick by any means possible. The only way to intervene against this proclivity of human nature is to remove the profit motive. And the only way to do this is through government intervention in the economy and the elimination of the free market. Under these kinds of schemes, the government will regulate all industry through a planned economy. This demand for governmental (political) control over the means of production and the peaceful voluntary trade between people is known by various names, including the mixed economy, market socialism, central planning, or just plain socialism or communism. This is primarily a political rather than an ethical perspective, having to do more with the proper role of government and the use of political means to guide social behaviour.

To judge business from the inside is first and foremost to accept the function of business as legitimate, and then ask whether businesses are being managed in ways consistent with their function. It is this concern with normative judgments of individuals that leads us to the issue of ethics. Ethics asks how man should act and seeks universal answers that apply to everybody.

What Is Ethics?

Ethics doesn’t consist of the opinions of what people like and don’t like about human behaviour. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies and defines a code of values to guide the choices and actions of people in the pursuit of life. Ethics seeks to identify and clarify the proper principles of conduct to guide the actions of man towards the good and away from evil. (See my earlier blog, “What Is Ethics? It’s Not Obvious To Most” .)

Ethics begins with observations of reality combined with logical reasoning to provide prescriptive guidance for sovereign man to achieve goals and ends appropriate to his nature as man. In essence, ethics or morality provides us as individuals with an intellectual roadmap or compass to help us determine, at the highest level, what’s for us and against us as living beings in our perpetual struggle with nature to live our lives successfully. That which can be shown in principle to support successful and prosperous human life is ‘the good’ and that which can be demonstrated to be harmful to human life represents ‘evil.’

The standard of value in ethics needs to be defined and defended. If ethics is to be meaningful at all, the standard of ethical value can be neither arbitrary nor subjective. Man’s life as the standard of value provides an objective basis for ethics that is reality-based. It is objective because it is defined by the nature of human life and verifiable facts about the world we live in.

(For a more detailed discussion about why human beings require ethics and how and why ethics is objectively grounded in reality, see my two earlier blogs on Ayn Rand’s Revolutionary Ethics, Part 1 and Part 2.)

What Is Business Ethics?

With this background, we can now gain some clarity on what business ethics is. When you put the prefix “business” in front of “ethics” the standard of ethical value doesn’t change. It remains man’s life. What changes is the context within which one considers the application of ethical principles. The context narrows from man’s actions in all realms, to consideration of a specific subset of human behaviour, namely that pertaining to the realm of business.

If business is the process of organizing people and resources to create value through voluntary exchange as an ongoing concern to derive a profit, and ethics is the identification of moral principles and a proper code of conduct to guide human action in the pursuit of life and individual happiness and well-being, then business ethics can refer to nothing more than the identification and application of ethical principles to promote and achieve the proper purpose of business.

Business ethics, then, pertains to discovering and defining the proper application of general ethical principles to guide the choices and actions of individuals engaged in business and the creation of value through voluntary trade and commerce. It is through this gateway that ethics melds with and shapes all aspects of business.

Because ethical human behaviour is ethical in all contexts, including business, it follows that there is not one valid code of conduct that excludes business and another that applies to business. In this way, the notion of a “business ethics” is misleading. Business ethics is not a distinctive, delineated code of guiding behaviour that exists apart from the wider and more general principles of morality. Rather, the notion of business ethics is a means of identifying a narrower context in which to discuss and study the application of the same universal ethic.

Ayn Rand’s Revolutionary Ethics, Pt. 2

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Ayn Rand set a scientific footing for ethics by demonstrating an unbreachable bond between ethics and reality. The Randian paradigm shift – I would call it a revolution - in ethics is her proof that there is an objective standard by which one judges what is good or evil. That standard is “man's life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man" (P. 25).

What man’s life requires is knowable in reality, and reason is required to figure it out. It's the role of philosophy to provide understanding of reality and man’s place in it, and to provide practical guidance for living happily and successfully. Ethics requires the discovery of the nature of man and the conditions that allow him to flourish according to his nature. In a famous formulation, Rand wrote: "Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil” (P. 25).

Because man is devoid of the survival instincts possessed by most other animals, man’s survival requires that he function as a conceptual consciousness, applying reason and purpose to direct his actions toward survival goals. Everything man needs has to be discovered by a human mind and produced by human effort.

This is an existential fact that applies to each of us. We each must discover knowledge and act to bring about and sustain our own survival. This leads to two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being, says Rand: thinking and productive work. (As an aside, business is a way of organizing to make the most of both.)

To succeed at the task of survival, man has to choose his goals and values in the context of a lifetime. The longer the range of a person's thinking, the better he can plan and prepare for contingencies. Failure to think long range for oneself leaves a person vulnerable and dependent on the thinking of others, and leaves one’s fate to chance. When people fail to take control of their own life and responsibility for their own welfare, they are left to depend on either the charity of others, or worse, the looting of others. Rand wrote: "Man has to be man by choice - and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man" (P. 27).

Rand holds each person’s life as the standard of value, and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual life (P. 27). For Rand, a standard is an abstract principle that applies to every individual person. But every individual person has to live his or her own life by applying this principle to the specific purpose of living a life proper to a rational being. Rand wrote: "Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man - in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life" (P. 27).

Rand defined virtue as the act by which one gains and/or keeps values, and she identified Rationality as man's basic virtue and the source or all other virtue. She identified irrationality - the willful and purposeful rejection of reason – as man’s greatest vice. She wrote that irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival. It is anti-mind and anti-life because for a man to reject reason - his only tool of survival as a conceptual being – is to set himself on a blind course of self-destruction (see p. 28).

Placing rationality as the central tenet of ethics – as the primary virtue – is merely the identification of facts about reality and about us as human beings. Reason is man’s primary means of survival. It is a fundamental and non-optional requirement of his life that man understand what this requires of him, and that he puts forth the mental effort required to learn to excel at its application.

For Rand, the purposeful pursuit of rationality and the disciplined application of reason to achieve one’s chosen ends against all obstacles has been so rare historically, that it represents for her the heroic in man. Rand’s personal heroic achievement resides in the dedication of her life’s work to defining and demonstrating why this is so.

Her research and thinking on what constitutes virtue for man and her identification of the primary virtues and their functions, led her to overturn and refute all prior attempts to define a valid ethical code by non-rational means. Her unique methodology of taking an inductive and deductive scientific approach to philosophy led her to a unified philosophic system that is Aristotelian in spirit, and which culminates in a rational, individualistic, integrated, this-worldly code of ethics. Rand firmly shifted the basis of a philosophic defense of ethics from altruism to a form of enlightened egoism. She called her total system of philosophy Objectivism, and referred to the Objectivist ethics as a morality of “rational self-interest – or rational selfishness” (P. xi).

While her methodological approach has been vilified and swept aside by those who believe that all virtue resides in altruism and personal sacrifice, and reject out of hand her premise that facts and value are inseparable, it remains that fifty years after the publication of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, there has yet to be a reasoned and valid refutation of her philosophy.

Those most likely to criticize Rand as an original thinker and as making an important contribution to our understanding of the field of ethics are those who aren’t seriously seeking truth and knowledge in the field of ethics, but rather have an agenda to hijack the normative language of ethics as a means to emotionally coerce others into agreeing with the social or political agenda they are advancing (usually an agenda that involves the collecting of the sacrifices of others - often through the initiation of physical force or deceit - to pursue their own hidden motives under the guise of benefiting “society” or God).

It’s ironic that those least able to defend their own agenda’s by means of rational arguments are the people most likely to disparage an author while failing to address serious legitimate challenges to their ethical ideas. Far too many thinkers dabbling in the subject of business ethics brush aside the serious challenges that Ayn Rand posed fifty years ago because facing those challenges are felt to be either unnecessary, or insurmountable. It is unfortunate that Rand’s work in ethics has been largely ignored through intellectual dishonesty and evasion in the hope that the advocacy of erroneous conclusions can remain valid. Nothing could be more irrational, and, frankly, more unethical, than such an evasion of reality.

Ayn Rand's Revolutionary Ethics, Pt. 1

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Ayn Rand was the first philosopher to attempt to establish a wholly scientific, inductive, bottom-up approach to ethics. She first presented her paradigm-shifting theory of rational egoism fully in the now famous 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in fictional form, but outlined her approach formally in a paper delivered in 1961 at a University of Wisconsin Symposium On "Ethics In Our Time," in a paper titled "The Objectivist Ethics." It is available in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. It should be required reading for anyone engaging in a discussion of ethics today because in this seminal work, Rand redefined the terms of any serious discussion of ethics. (All page references in this essay are to the Signet paperback Centennial Edition, ISBN 0-451-16393-1.)

Rand pursued an intellectual quest to establish a rational and objectively demonstrable answer to the question of why man needs a code of values and a means to identify valid moral principles. No philosopher before her had succeeded in this task.

“Most philosophers," wrote Rand, "took the existence of ethics for granted... and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation” (P. 14). They either tried to establish good or evil, right and wrong, by appeals to either God or Society, thereby taking a theological or sociological approach rather than a scientific approach aimed at establishing objective grounding for ethics as a science.

Ethics as a science, writes Rand, deals with discovering and defining a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions - the choices and actions that determine the purpose of his life. Rand contended that the starting point of any investigation into ethics had to begin with the question of whether and why man needs a code of value at all. It is only then that one can proceed to the central issue of ethics by answering the question: "What particular code of values should man accept?”

Why man needs a code of values is a scientific question for Rand because to answer it, one must appeal to reality. Rand challenged herself to identify a rational and objectively demonstrable approach to ethics, in contrast to the dominant approach which takes the rationale for ethics for granted as a historical fact. Rand wrote: "In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics - with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions - moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational." (P. 14)

For Rand, it didn’t matter whether one tried to establish the basis for ethics on the will of god or the will of society. Neither, she argued, could be justified by an appeal to reason. "Most philosophers," she wrote, "have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, that in the field of ethics - in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals - man must be guided by something other than reason” (P. 15).

That ‘something’, she wrote, was faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, urge, wish or whim. She defined whim as "a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause" (p. 14). "Whatever else they may disagree about," she concluded, "today’s moralists agree that ethics is 'a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason – mind - reality" (P. 15).

Respect for, and adherence to reason, mind and reality are prerequisites of science and a scientific approach to living. Those who reject reason in ethics affirm their position that reason and facts have no place in a discussion about what values are, why man needs them, and how man should apply them to achieve his goals. Such people divorce facts from value, placing the former (facts) in the scientific realm, and the later (values) in a place where reason, mind and reality have nothing to contribute. For these folks, value, which is the subject matter of ethics, is a matter of faith or personal feelings or whims, a realm to which they assert that reason and reality have nothing to contribute.

For Rand, reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by our senses. It operates by the process of thinking. The faculty of reason has to be exercised by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. To say that ethics is beyond the realm of reason is to assert that our senses and the world with which they interact have nothing to contribute to our understanding of the subject matter that ethics pertains to. It is to assert that ethics is beyond reality. It is to assert that ethics derives from, or pertains to a mystical or extra-sensory realm beyond the grasp of normal human experience. It removes thinking – reason and logic - as a valid methodology for ethical discovery and the pursuit of the right and the good. It removes the illumination of reason from the realm of man’s pursuit of values and the achievement of the good.

If reason and thinking are excluded as valid methodologies of ethical inquiry and discovery, all that's left are methodologies that reject the validity of reason and man's mind, namely, some variation of mysticism or nihilism.

Reason and thinking are required by man to focus his awareness - his consciousness - on reality and deal with it so he can take action and provide for his survival as an individual. Everything a person does to sustain life requires thought, and though is not infallible. We have the responsibility to initiate thinking to acquire and apply knowledge to help us define and pursue our values and successfully live our lives. I will quote Rand at length because it is critical to understand why she holds that reason and ethics are inseparable. She writes:

"[Man] has to initiate [a process of thought], to sustain it and bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him – by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, his is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.” (P.p. 23-24).

Rand’s argument leads to the conclusion that "Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival - not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life" (P. 24).

Ethics 50 Years After Atlas Shrugged

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

A major paradigm shift in the field of philosophy, including ethics, came in the middle of the 20th Century with the publication of the novel Atlas Shrugged by American philosopher Ayn Rand. This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and hence it is timely to revisit her revolutionary perspective on ethics and the challenge her philosophy poses to those who argue for particular ethical viewpoints with disregard for, or ignorance of, her foundational paradigm-shifting philosophic arguments.

If you are seriously interested in business ethics, and have not yet read Atlas Shrugged, you are doing yourself an injustice. If you have heard about Ayn Rand and have not read Atlas out of prejudice, then you are committing a grave intellectual error. The bottom line is that today, any serious discussion of ethics must, at some point, deal with issues Rand raises not only about ethics, but about other related philosophic issues about reality, knowledge, and politics. If one is truly seeking ethical guidance in the form of a rational, principled philosophy, consideration of Ayn Rand’s arguments are foundational, even if in the end one chooses to reject them.

What Rand offered in Atlas Shrugged was a complete rethinking of philosophy as a discipline and its role in human life in all its dimensions, including science, economics, business, politics, and psychology. What is even more astounding is that she presented her discoveries and formulations in the form of art – fiction – which she later followed up in her non-fiction philosophic essays. Her great achievement was her ability to reformulate two thousand years of western philosophy in a way akin to sweeping out the trash that settled into dark corners and cluttered up people’s minds.

Rand was able to challenge to the core a plethora of widely embraced cultural “truths” and paradigms that have been leading thinkers away from truth, understanding, achievement and well-being. In the face of a world gone mad by its acceptance of irrationality, and in the face of an intellectual culture that had virtually abandoned reason as a valid means of acquiring knowledge, Rand offered a rational and meaningful alternative to millions of people where theretofore no viable alternative existed.

Against a vision of nihilism and sacrifice and tribal bloodshed as man’s only hope for survival, she offered a different vision of personal and social renaissance through the efficacy of the human mind to know reality, to reach valid conclusions through reason and logic, to understand the requirements of personal happiness, to achieve that state through the discovery and application of objective ethical principles, and to live in a state of freedom through the organization of individuals into a society that understands the need for, and respects the principle of individual natural rights.

What differentiated Rand from others was that she didn’t just assert her vision and the premises that underlie its foundation. She offered proof – proof that any person, with appropriate effort, could understand and think through for themselves. What she offered was a competing, unified theory of rational philosophic principles that had a stronger theoretical and practical appeal to that which existed (and still exists) as an alternative. She presented philosophy, including ethics, not as a set of disconnected mystical or arbitrary ideas to be accepted on faith or by appeal to experts, nor as interesting irresolvable paradoxes and unanswerable questions to aimlessly ponder, but as a rational, coherent, objective system of thought grounded in reality and logic, with the purpose of serving the well-being of each individual. She demonstrated that man requires freedom of thought and action to live happy and successful lives proper to human beings, as against others who disingenuously argued that it is natural and right for man to live under the authoritarian rule of others who claim through mystical or intuitive means to know what is best, and that ethics requires conformity to authority and the sanctioning of coercion and personal sacrifice to achieve the ends of the dictatorial-minded.

Atlas Shrugged is a world-shaking book about philosophical ideas in action (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged for an overview). While most people have not heard of the book nor its author, that’s not to be taken as an indication of its popularity or its influence. A 1992 U.S. Library of Congress survey found it to be the most influential book in the United States, second only to the Bible. In 2006, fifty years after its publication, sales of the novel in bookstores topped 130,000 copies! When I checked amazon.com on November 14, 2007, the paperback version ranked an astounding #330 in books.

Today, more than ever, every person that takes business seriously and is searching for rational philosophic guidance against the forced imposition of the irrational, needs to read and heed the philosophic wisdom embedded in Atlas Shrugged.

What Is Ethics? It's Not Obvious To Most.

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies and defines a code of values to guide human choices and actions in the pursuit of life. It begins by asking the question as to why man needs values, defines a standard of value, and then defines a code of values or ethical principles to guide the action of individuals in pursuit of their own life.

As such, ethics is a requirement for living a successful life. To live the kind of life proper to Man, one must pursue values that support one’s life and well-being. It is the role of ethics to provide rational guidance in this realm, so that each person can achieve, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

In her 1961 essay “The Objectivist Ethics,” American philosopher Ayn Rand defined ethics this way: “What is morality or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions – the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.”

For Rand, it was the role of philosophers to define and rationally defend such a code. The validity of a code of ethics was, for her, a matter of life and death not only for individual people, but for mankind as a species. She was irate at the failure of philosophers in this regard, and made it her mission to challenge the lethargy and status quo of academia.

Ethics has been contentious through the ages, not because of a disagreement that Man requires a set of guiding principles to define good and evil and guide his choices and actions, but because leading thinkers have not agreed on what the standard of value should be. In general two choices have been offered: the standard of value is the will of god (or other metaphysical entity, real or imagined); or the standard of value is Man’s life.

It is this disagreement about the standard of good and evil, right and wrong, which leads to major disagreements in ethics. Without the ability to discuss the grounds for different viewpoints in a rational way, no acceptable peaceful resolution can be found. The wider framework for a reasoned and scientific discussion of these more fundamental issues is to be found in the discipline of Philosophy. To the extent one is committed to appeal to god rather than reason, one deals in the realm not of philosophy, but of theology. In this realm, faith, not reason, determines the standard of value.

Rand defined philosophy as the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence, man, and of man’s relationship to existence. Unlike the natural sciences that deal with particular aspects of existence, philosophy deals with wider aspects that pertain to everything that exists. At its best, philosophy is a unifying science of understanding.

The task of philosophy, wrote Rand, “is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to this own life and character (ethics) – and in regard to society (politics); the means of concretizing this view is given to him by esthetics.” (From her essay “The Chickens’ Homecoming,” quoted in The Ayn Rand Lexicon, p. 359.)

Here are a couple of other definitions of ethics to set the context for further discussion.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ethics as the “science of morals.” It defines morals as “pertaining to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil, in relation to actions, volitions, or character,” and “concerned with virtue and vice, or the rules of right conduct, as a subject of study.”

The Mirriam-Webster On-line Dictionary defines ethics as “a set of moral principles: a theory or system of moral values.”

An online business glossary defines ethics as: “A system of principles based on ideas of right and wrong, whether true or false; rules of practice in respect to human actions”
(Small Business Glossary, http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/glossary/defethics.html).

Author Elaine Sternberg, in her book Just Business: Business Ethics in Action, defines ethics this way: “As commonly used, ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ refer variously to moral codes, to the actions enjoined by them, and to the study of either or both…. When used more strictly, however, the term ‘ethics’ refers simply to a branch of philosophy, that which seeks to identify and clarify the presuppositions of human conduct having to do with good and evil.”

My view is similar to that expressed by Sternberg.

Ethics is, first and foremost, the branch of philosophy that identifies principles to guide human actions as we pursue our lives. As a branch of philosophy, ethics must adhere to the principles of the discipline, and those partaking in the subject must adhere to the basic requirements imposed by reality and reason.

As a normative science, ethics begins with observations of reality combined with logical reasoning to provide prescriptive guidance for man to achieve goals and ends appropriate to his nature as Man. In essence, it provides mankind with intellectual ammunition to help us determine, at the highest level, what’s for us and against us in our struggle with nature to live our lives successfully. That which can be shown in principle to support successful and prosperous human life is ‘the good’ and that which can be demonstrated to be harmful represents ‘evil.’ The standard of value is human life.

It should be pointed out that not everybody agrees that ethics is a normative science and that it refers to a branch of philosophy. As Sternberg indicates, there is common usage around the term “ethics” that is descriptive and non-normative. For example one could research and report on the normative practices of various groups of people or cultures and speak about their ‘ethics.’ Hence, talk of ‘business ethics’ can be both prescriptive (business leaders should behave this way) and descriptive (our survey shows that most business leaders behave this way). This latter approach is how the humanities typically approach ethics, and can be seen in areas such as anthropology, sociology, or history. This is what might be called a ‘journalistic’ approach to ethics, as differentiated from ethics proper.

Still, it is only right that if you are going to profess to be an ethicist or expert in the realm of ethics, such as business ethics, that you provide a definition of, or delineate what it is you are talking about. I don’t trust people who want to tell me what I must do to be ethical unless they can demonstrate why such action is ethical and why other actions are unethical. I want to know what the standard of value is and what ethical principles are involved. I want to assess the real world consequences of any recommended moral prescriptions. My advice to everyone is: be wary of those practitioners who provide self-serving, non-objective definitions of ethics, and who cannot demonstrate the objectivity of their prescriptive judgments. Don’t be bullied by ethical language and the desire to be perceived as ‘ethical’ in the eyes of others. Ethics is open to human knowledge and human judgment, and, if one pursues it as the science which it is, then ethical conclusions are subject to reasonable proof.

Any discussion that takes us from what is the case to what ought to be the case, if it is not merely someone’s opinion but to which we intend to give the weight of serious principled guidance in pursuit of the good, takes us into the realm of ethics and philosophy, and the full weight of these disciplines come into play.

What Is A Business? It's Not Obvious To Many.

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

If we are going to talk about business ethics, we need to begin by understanding what business is. While it may seem intuitively obvious that everybody knows what business is, this isn’t the case. In fact, much of the controversy and confusion about business ethics takes place because business ethics advocates don't know what business is. Often what they are ranting about has very little to do with business ethics. That’s why it is important to begin at the beginning.

To get a good sense of what business is and pertains to, the dictionary is always a good place to start.

The pertinent definition of business from The Shorter OED is: “Trade, commercial transactions or engagements,” and “A commercial enterprise as a going concern.”

Commercial is defined as: engaged in commerce, trading; Of or relating to commerce or trade; Viewed as a matter of profit and loss.

Commerce is defined as: Exchange between men of the products of nature and art; buying and selling together; exchange of merchandise, especially on a large scale between different countries or districts.

Profit is defined as: The advantage or benefit of or resulting from something; The pecuniary gain in any transaction; the excess of returns over the outlay of capital.

Loss pertains to losing and to lose, and in the context of business, to spend unprofitably; to waste, get no return or result for (one’s labour or effort).

So from these definitions we may glean that business as an activity pertains to commercial trade through buying and selling as an ongoing concern to derive a profit. A business is an entity the purpose of which is to engage in this activity.

To demonstrate that there is a broad fundamental lack of understanding of what business is among the educated segments of our society, here are a couple of examples.

The first is from the University of Minnesota College Of Liberal Arts. They write in answer to the questions What is business?:

What is business?
A business can be defined as an organization that provides goods and services to others who want or need them. When many people think of business careers, they often think of jobs in large wealthy corporations. Many business-related careers, however, exist in small businesses, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and educational settings. Furthermore, you don't need a degree in business to obtain many of these positions. In short, every sector of our economy needs people with strong overall skills that can be applied to business-type careers. (http://www.class.umn.edu/business_and_cla_degrees/what_is_business.html)

The fundamental concept of business here is the provision of goods and services to others who want or need them. What is missing is any notion of commerce, trade, being an ongoing concern, and the motivation to earn a profit. Therefore, according to this concept, non-profit organizations and governments are businesses. This is an example of the error of defining a concept without reference to its essential differentiating characteristics, which for business, are commercial trade and profit seeking. It is precisely these attributes that differentiates business in kind from not-for-profits and government agencies.

Here’s another one from the U.S. Army CPI Resource Center. CPI stands for Continuous Process Improvement.

What is Business?
We define a business as any organization (commercial or government) whose aim is to satisfy a set of customer requirements and is required to deliver results and provide value to the receiving customers, organizations and/or institutions. This is obviously a simplistic view of an organization, but in order to grasp the importance of processes it is critical to understand the importance of business processes to business success. It is also important to realize that regardless of the nature of an organization (e.g., commercial, government or others) your operations and processes have to provide value to someone outside of your organization. Starting from the business's place in the world will help you understand how an organization must behave to serve its purpose and ultimately its external customers. (http://www.army.mil/ESCC/cpi/biz1.htm)

Once again, the concept of business advocated here pertains to any organization that has a purpose. The characteristics of commercial trade and profit seeking are not deemed to be essential aspects differentiating business from other forms of organizations.

These examples were the first two that I found by Googling “what is business.” Perhaps it is a coincidence that both are from organizations that are not businesses, and therefore the equivocation between “business” and “organization”. I have no grounds to speculate why they have a problem recognizing that while all businesses can be considered organizations, not all organizations can be considered businesses, nor why they wish to portray non-profit and government organizations as businesses. Whatever the reason, it stands as proof that when discussing matters of business and business ethics, it cannot be assumed that just because someone is using the word “business” that they have a proper understanding of what a business is.

If you require more evidence, go to Google and type in "define:business" for a page of definitions of business that Google has compiled from the web. Many of them are guilty of getting the definition of business wrong.

In addition to non-profits and governments, there is one other category that is commonly confused as a business but is not, namely hobbies. One organization that correctly recognized the distinction between businesses and non-businesses, was a free legal advice web site called FreeAdvice. While they draw attention to this point from a tax perspective, nonetheless the distinction is valid and worth keeping in mind:

What is a business?
A business is an activity performed for profit.
The difference between carrying on a business and a hobby is that a business has an expectation of profit, is run in a systematic, continuous and regular businesslike manner, and has ordinary commercial principles governing it (such as business and accounting records). A person who collects and sells baseball cards on a regular basis from a store is engaged in a business, while a casual collector, who will occasionally trade a card or two with friends is probably engaged in a hobby. The distinction is important for tax purposes as losses from a business are tax-deductible, while losses generated from a hobby are not. (http://business-law.freeadvice.com/business-law/profit_business.htm).

The most concise definition of business I was able to find, and which will serve as my definition in this blog, was this one from the Credit Research Foundation: "An organization engaged in producing goods and services to make a profit." (http://www.crfonline.org/orc/glossary/b.html).

A Proper Approach to Business Ethics

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Welcome to Business Ethics For Real, a resource for business people who take business ethics seriously.

Ethical behaviour is an important aspect of achieving personal success and business success. This is the issue that will be explored in this forum, particularly as it relates to business-related issues.

A realist approach to business ethics begins with the facts of reality and an acceptance that an objective reality exists. That which exists, including us, exists in reality. And everything that exists, including us, has a specific nature. To live our lives successfully, we must discover the requirements of how to achieve success based on the nature of human beings and their requirements, and how we must interact with everything else that exists in this world. Achieving success in life is, essentially, a scientific affair. Ethics, too, is essentially a scientific matter.

The task of defining the principles of rational living falls to the science of philosophy; more specifically, to the branch of philosophy known as ethics.

Because ethical principles are universal and apply to all people at all times, they apply to people engaged in productive work as entrepreneurs, professionals, business leaders, managers, and salaried employees, both in the private and public sectors. Ethical principles are applicable to all people engaged in voluntary trade.

While this seems obvious, when it comes to thinking about ethics, most people think that there is a separate ethics for people who are associated with business organizations that is different from the ethics of other types of organizations, such as governments or voluntary associations. That there is a multiplicity of ethics is a prevailing social myth.

"Business" is a higher level concept that describes a relationship between people, as do the concepts "hospital," "university," "union," or "government." Each of these organizations are composed of invididual people working and acting together to achieve particular ends. The type of organizations themselves, while they may have specific purposes that define their reason for being, do not have ethical obligations. Ethical obligations apply only to people, without which there are not businesses, hospitals, universities, unions, governments, etc.

BE4R takes a scientific approach to ethics. If ethics is to be meaningful and valid, its validation must be based in reality. Like any science. to be objective and relevant to humans, ethics must reject mysticism, superstition, and delusional fantasy as a valid foundation for establishing ethical principles. On the critically important topic of ethics, we must have the courage and discipline to move beyond the dark ages of willful ignorance to shining light of a new renaissance of reason and science in defining human affairs.

If ethics is to have any value at all to human life, we can only discover it through the application of reason and logic. And if we are to make use of ethics in business as a means to contribute to human happiness and success in the pursuit of values, ethics must be inextricably linked to reality, and be capable of integration into the goals of business practitioners.

Just as reason and reality are the basic building blocks of business success, so should an approach to ethics be built from the same foundations.

Hopefully BE4R can contribute to an understanding of ethics as it pertains to issues of business and commerce, and become a valuable forum for business executives and practitioners to consider ethical issues from a practical, philosophical perspective.