Amalgamate Ethics with Business: An Essentiality and No More an Oxymoron

Undoubtedly, the outlook of amoral business persists and indeed a widespread observation is that the phrase ‘business ethics’ is an oxymoron and that the mainsprings of business activity, self-interest and the pursuit of profit, preclude and exclude any considerations of morality. Furthermore, widely reported and recurring financial scandals that feed into the growing public perceptions of ‘fat-cat’ attitudes towards corporate directors and management has served to sensitise corporate leaders to the disapproval of ‘stakeholders’ who are no longer confined to the ‘shareholders’ of companies. Thus, while the name of Enron has become almost synonymous in the public psyche with ‘misconduct in the boardroom’, a plethora of ‘golden farewells’ to senior managers or directors of firms whose performance put forward more an image of incompetence and risky behaviour has fuelled the perceptions that such individuals have been neither accountable to, nor caring of, the interests of those in whose names they have conducted themselves in their business capacities. Then when one adds to them the cases of gross negligence of environmental and ‘health and safety’ catastrophes—such as the ‘EXXON Valdez’, the events at Bhopal and the spread of ‘acid rain’ across large swathes of Northern Europe and the BP oil spill—etc. has resulted in repeated calls for improvement in the standards of behaviour of those entrusted with the management and direction of corporate affairs in the modern capitalist marketplace.¹ Core premise in business cannot succeed in societies that fail.