John W. Collins

Is business ethics an oxymoron

Introduction: Business and Games The analogy between a game and business (both inside and outside the “business world”) is a common one. One often hears, “That is the way the game is played,” or “You’re not playing the game,” or “Just play the game.” The idea reinforces the impression that the business of doing business is an isolated system of activities which has its own rules. In following these rules or breaking them, it is not so much that we do not do anything right or wrong, but rather that we do something correct or incorrect with reference to the rules of the game. Some of the rules make sense, others do not and are even silly, but in any case, moral considerations do not really enter in. Life in the corporate world, as life anywhere, can be made into a game. In the September/October 1983 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Robert Jackall, a sociologist, has done a good job of describing what the rules in corporate world are in the U.S.1 With the demise of the “Protestant Work Ethic,” the corporate world is ruled by pyramidal politics in which decisions are pushed low in the power structure, and credit is pushed high; in which the corporate CEO is treated like a king in a feudal system; that this feudal system is structured so that people with less power become the scapegoats for those responsible for mistakes; how success and failure are not defined in terms of real contributions, but socially, in terms of “luck”; where appearance is as important as reality, etc. Given the moral or immoral realities of business life, treating it all as a game may be a necessary psychological means of providing distance from how one really feels about the whole thing, and such it might be useful for survival. But it takes very little thought to see that it is a rare game indeed into which moral considerations do not enter. For games in which one can win, one can win fairly or unfairly by following the rules or by cheating. Cheating in professional sports, for example, can have grave consequences for the player who cheats, from monetary penalties to permanent expulsion. There is nothing within the rules themselves which explains why this should be: it is rather that moral considerations lie behind such penalties. The general analogy thus fails to support the contention that ethics has nothing to do with business and business with ethics. But perhaps the comparison is not with business and games but business and “mere” games. If so, this latter analogy fails as well. For whereas work in the business world has rules as does any kind of activity, there the simile would appear to end. Much of what many workers do in the business world has no similarity