Judging the Planks in My Own Eye

Business ethics with its multiple identities and its conservative-liberal and leader-follower poles is more ambivalent, less coherent, more permissive, and less intuitively inspiring than deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, philosophical liberalism, libertarianism, and theism. Where it excels, I will suggest in this lecture, is in its practical, introspective efficacy. In the first and central part of the lecture, I will use cases of possible ethical violations drawn from my own life to consider how business ethics as I define it and certain other ethical systems handle the cases. In the second part, I will build on the cases to advance an introspective conjecture that I and other moderns who are under the influence of business ethics may well do better in following moral rules and in achieving worthy results for themselves, their organizations, and their societies than people under the influence of higher-minded but less efficacious ethical systems have done in the past. In the poetry-centered last section, I will suggest that the yin-yang poles in business ethics make a distinctive contribution to modern cultural and economic achievements that may well exceed the contributions of also valuable, related but different, yin-yang poles in psychology, law, religion, and politics.