Corporate social (ir)responsibility?

I often wonder why most of us have stopped being concerned about what is morally right as we choose our actions. This is a disturbing trend. It demonstrates that we are becoming more and more selfish, and in a way that is not really possible because any action of ours that affect others’ lives cannot be entirely value-free.

I believe the philosophy and practices of our corporate sector have contributed to a large extent to this crisis in Sri Lankan morality. Let me explain why I think so.

There are four inherent features in our corporate sector that I would like to cite as being causal factors in creating our current moral crisis. The first has to do with how our companies’ philosophical foundations have been distorted.

The Sri Lankan business climate rests on the acceptance of the philosophy of Individualism. It believes that the

 individual, rather than society as a whole, is what matters most. Individuals should have the right to pursue their own vision of the good life, and relate to others as equals in voluntary, unregulated exchange. Society’s proper function is to make that possible.

Individualism is not an inherently immoral doctrine. Problems arise from how those philosophies have been distorted by many of our business leaders.

Individualism, for instance, has often been reduced to Egoism, the view that one should always act in a self-interested manner; or simply put - egoism maintains that one should always treat others as a means to achieving one’s own ends, never as ends in themselves; but the moral point of view requires that other human beings be treated as ends in themselves.

The second feature is the profit motive. Today profit in the form of money is regarded as the lifeblood of the corporate system.

Businesses are ranked in terms of how much profit they have made, largely ignoring other morally accepted qualities of a business: e.g. the well-being of employees, the integrity of the product (is it safe?), whether the business contributes to the well-being of the communities in which it operates, and whether it has made sure that it will not have a negative impact on the environment.

In emphasising the importance of making money at all costs, an implicit value judgment has been accepted by all those associated with the corporate sector that how much money one has is the most important thing in life. People will deny that they have made this value judgment.

The typical response is to maintain that “business is business.” If it is immoral, that part of corporate life should be separated from the part of people’s lives. But this is certainly false. Business leaders make decisions that affect the lives of many other people, and there are often ethical dimensions to these decisions.

The third feature I would point to concerns the way our corporate sector, through advertising, has quite deliberately turned most Sri Lankans into materialists in order to achieve its goal of maximising profits.

We are repeatedly told that to be happy, we must have the right “stuff” - certain clothes, a certain television, etc - and, of course, what the right “stuff” is constantly changing, so we’ll have to keep buying new products. Most people’s lives revolve around making money so they can buy whatever it is that corporate Sri Lanka tells them they should be buying.

The fourth feature that I would cite is the prevalent attitude in the corporate sector that the only restriction on making a profit is that one must stay within the law. In general, business leaders tend to adopt the attitude that if it isn’t illegal, it’s all right. They only worry about what’s illegal, not what’s ethical.

The main reason for this, of course, is that they know that they will (if caught) be punished if they break the law; but it’s not so clear that anything will happen to them if they do something that is ethically wrong, if it’s not against the law. So it seems prudent to just worry about what is illegal.

Naturally, business leaders are unlikely to spend any time worrying about the ethical implications of their policies. They have, as a result, sent the message to their employees, and others in society, that ethics can be collapsed into legality.

So, to put it in corporate jargon, the bottom line is not right. But the time is right to put it right. The stakes have never been higher, for our business leaders to reflect on social values and change their thinking and behaviour.

Corporate sector and Social leadership each have important roles to play - one because of the power it now has and the other because of the power it ought to have - if we are to improve the moral climate in this country.