13.1 Practical Business Ethics

And that’s it! We’ve reached the end of our business ethics journey. Along the way we’ve covered lots of different topics from all areas of business, with all sorts of ethical problems. We’ve also worked our way through dozens of case studies.

The primary strategy we’ve used in all this ethical thinking is one we introduced in the very first chapter. We called it the method of “reflect and test,” and it’s a way of figuring out the right way to handle an ethical issue in a business environment. That point is worth emphasizing—this is a way not only to think about ethical issues, but to act on them, or to act to prevent them. That’s what we really care about in the end, after all: doing something, rather than just theorizing.

So let’s get a brief review of the reflect and test method here. The first part of the method is to reflect. We begin reflecting on a possible ethical issue by gathering our information: who is involved in this situation, and what desires do they have? How are the people in the situation related to each other, both in business terms and in other ways? What aspects of our business does the situation involve, and what possible consequences are we facing, in the near future and the far future?

Once we’ve got all the facts together, we can identify the values in the situation. Sometimes the value might be as simple as something like “fairness,” but in larger situations, there could be multiple values, and they might be competing.

With the values now placed next to the facts, we can try to come up with ethical principles: general statements that guide our behavior by taking into account the important values and making sense of the situation we’re in. We’ve seen many examples of principles throughout this book.

The second part of our method then instructs us to test our principles. The goal in testing is to find out whether the principles we’ve come up with—the statements of value that we want to guide our behavior—actually do what they’re supposed to. The test involves applying the principles to other cases, and asking ourselves, when we change the details of our actual situation, do our principles still apply? Can we imagine occasions where the principles don’t apply? Why don’t they, and how might that be relevant to the situation we’re in?

Our tests of our principles might reveal that they don’t do a good job capturing what we think is ethically important. When that happens, we refine our principles. That is, we change them—we might make them more or less general, or more or less sensitive to different values.

The final step of this method is to repeat what we’ve just done! After refining our principles, we test them again by reflecting on what they mean and how they apply to different cases. If we need to refine them again then we do that too. Depending on how tricky our situation might be, we might even repeat the process again.

The end result of this method will be ethical principles that, because of our tests, apply to many different situations and that reveal and express our values. Remember, though, that the point of the method isn’t just to end up with these shiny new principles. The point of the method is to use them—it’s to put them into practice in solving the ethical dilemmas that our business lives inevitably present us with.

And that’s the beauty of ethical principles, and the great advantage of working through a book like this one: you end up with tools that you can use. Business ethics can be so much more than a primer in how not to get caught, but only if we want them to be. Real ethical principles, created in response to meaningful values and designed to be used, can become powerful means of change both for ourselves and for our organizations.

Across our many discussions and case studies, we’ve tried to develop an awareness of these principles. To be sensitive to the ethical dimensions of business situations is not a special gift that only the morally enlightened receive; that sensitivity is the result of practice. We practice it as we read and discuss case studies. We practice it as we consider how our behavior affects others, and how the behavior of our organizations affects other people, other organizations, and the environment. And we practice it as we look over the ethical landscape of the business world, with all its promises and problems.

In the end, you and I must decide which principles will be important to us, and why. The world of business we come to in the beginning of our careers has already been made, but that world is a creation of other people—and as soon as we begin to traverse it, we’re creating it too. What will we create, and how? A world of human-centric values with fair and humane standards, by a conscious, principle-centered focus? Or something else? With each thought, with each choice, with each action, we remake the ethical landscape.

When we’re done, what will it look like?