At the end of their 4-page Code of Business Conduct and Ethics Goldman Sachs declares that they reserve the right to “waive” certain provisions contained in the document. Well that certainly makes for an easy conscience, doesn’t it? American Public Media’s Kai Ryssdal interviews Greg Unruh, director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics who argues that at the end of the day “companies don’t like to miss out on profits, so the safety valve is allowing them to sacrifice their ethics if the price is right.” Why bother creating a document setting forth moral obligations when one reserves the right to waive them all along?
Thursday, June 17, 2010, 8:42 AM
June 18th, 2010 | 12:41 pm | #1
Wouldn’t it depend on what the “certain provisions” are and why they’re being waived?
In Mark 7: 11-12, Jesus says this: “But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God),then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother.”
The “provision” is that the man is making a gift devoted to God. Jesus doesn’t seem to think that the refusal to waive it was an expression of the highest ethics.
And Unruh’s comment — “companies don’t like to miss out on profits, so the safety valve is allowing them to sacrifice their ethics if the price is right.” — just strikes me as a wholesale slander, which neither he nor you even pretend to quantify.
Do people at all levels of a company make un-ethical decisions? Yes. Are those decisions *necessarily* driven by free market principles? No.
June 18th, 2010 | 2:55 pm | #2
JW: Your biblical citation does nothing for your defense, and actually undermines it. Jesus does not teach situational ethics, but condemns the pharisees for “making void the word of God by your tradition.” And I am not sure what it is you think is slanderous. Of course those decisions are not *necessarily* driven by free market principles–just the right price. Wouldn’t that be the “provision”? (see Matthew 6:22-23 if that’s the case).
June 18th, 2010 | 3:14 pm | #3
That’s my point: I’m not convinced that the possibility of waiving certain provisions, under certain conditions, in a corporate code of ethics constitutes “situational ethics” anymore than Jesus’ statement did.
From Wikipedia “In common law jurisdictions, slander refers to a malicious, false and defamatory spoken statement or report.” Unruh’s spoken statement qualifies as all three.
When you say that “those decisions” are driven “just by the right price,” what do you mean by “right price?” The price of the company’s stock, the amount of profit or the profit margin, or the price of a bribe?
Your citation from Matthew seems to imply that you think that “companies” in general – or the people who work for them – actually don’t have any ethics, regardless of whether they have a written “code”? And simply look at the profit projects as the normative criteria for making an ethical decision?
If that’s the case, then they clearly don’t have “situational ethics.” They only have an ethic that is determined by…whatever you mean by “right price.”
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