Ethical standards in decline

fishin

Ok...let's play it your way. You apparently believe that there is no actual need to place regulations on corporate behavior. At least, that would seem to follow. Group entities have no relevance to ethical matters whatsoever, individuals are the only means of address to correcting/improving conduct. Do I have this right?

No. Again, you aren't following along here and you are mixing two seperate issues as if they are one in the same. They aren't. The discussion here is on ETHICS. Governments do not create or regulate ethics. They create LAWS to regulate conduct (both ethical and unethical), and enforce those laws through criminal or civil courts.

As an example, it is commonly accepted that it is unethical to lie. There is NO law that makes it illegal to lie (There are laws against fraud which usually includes a lie but it requires more than just the lie.) and the creation of such a law would create a legal nightmare.

Not to be contrary fishin but lying under oath, perjury, is a felony. Would you consider that a law that regulates act of lying.

And slander, don't forget slander

It is about as close as you can get Joanne but there is a subtle difference.

The charge of perjury requires that you voluntarilly sign or swear to tell the truth and the lie (or ommission) would have to have material relevance to the point of inquiry. It takes more than just the lie to meet the legal standard for perjury.

A straight out law against lying (i.e. "It shall be unlawful to intentionally misstate the truth") would include lying in any/all forms with no other qualifications.

ethics
Each generation seems to believe it is the last to possess ethics. Ethics do not change, people have always and will continue to fail in meeting their own self-set standards. Life would not be so fun otherwise.

ezshooter

You find it fun to break ethical standards??? I think you are confusing this with breaking silly administratively established rules set by the military or some other gov't beauracracy. If you are a doctor or lawyer please identify yourself so that I can never engage your services.

breaking ethical standards
No, I try never to break ethical standards. I pay all my bills on time, I never cheat anyone and I'm faithful to a husband of several decades. I just find it amusing when people, full of weakness and fault as we are, claim to represent the final generation of ethical persons on earth. Ethics are the correct standard to set, but don't kid yourself, we never completely fulfill our best intentions. I'm not encouraging a lack of standards, heavens no!! I'm just saying no one goes through their life without making some mistakes.

Ezshooter

Oh----I could have sworn you said it was FUN!!!!!!

Observing human failure is first class entertainment. Shakespear to the soaps.

ezshooter

Observing human FAILURE is first class entertainment. If that husband of several decades was unfaithful to you--------would you call me so I could watch you laugh about that?

fishin

Ok...let's go very slowly and carefully. There is semantic rascality afoot this day.

What is a 'law'? How does one come into being? In most communities in early America, there were no laws. There were local values and norms. Laws were yet to be codified (written down, organized). Community behavior was policed via mechanisms such as the charivari (or chivari). Some individual would violate a norm and the other folks would come around late at night and bang pots. Later, folks got a bit more organized, and wrote down a few 'laws' on paper. Then there were jails. Eventually, John Ashcroft.

The entire process, at whatever level of sophistication, is to the end of enforcing social norms or notions of 'proper' conduct - or moral conduct, or ethical conduct - depending on how one stipulates the definitions of 'moral' and 'ethical'.

You are, in your post above, stipulating a particular definition of 'ethics' (of course, the term is used variously - you use it to mean 'moral' in your first post) something like 'the STUDY of right and wrong'. Fine. Let's use the term that way. "Ethics' is merely the study of right and wrong, therefore it can't be legislated. So, let's get that term out of the way.

Let's say 'right' and 'wrong' get legislated into law. After all, it is SOMETHING that gets legislated into law. Sure, it is acts, but a particular species of acts - those which violate some accepted principle of right and wrong.

So, laws address acts. One shouldn't expect to find any law regarding corporate behavior if corporations are not considered capable of commiting acts. Yet we find many such laws, eg. regarding monopolies.

Now, this is the final post I'll make on this issue. If you are going to hold your position, that'll be fine with me.

Ezshooter, I think the reason every generation thinks they are the last to have ethical standards, is because the standards do change just enough for the old timers to get the uneasy feeling that the sands are shifting under their feet.

Just a small example in sexual morals. When I was a boy, the movies were considered to be sinful by the church I attended. One reason was that the lives of women as portrayed in the movies were thought to be unchaste. Also to buy tickets and thus support movie stars whose lives were believed to be mostly degrading was thought to be wrong. Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and other actresses were denounced from the pulpit as Hollywood whores.

Fast forward to our times: the personal lives of Hollywood celebrities, however unconventional they may be, do not stop even conservative church people from enjoying the movies. Marilyn Monroe's movies are watched by almost everyone as portrayls of an innocent, fun loving young woman. More innocent in fact than the current Hollywood prototype.

So, What has happened? Although the more conservative moralists in our society have not forsaken their strictures against adultery etc, they certainly have changed their view of what it is okay to enjoy in the way of sexually charged entertainment.

Also if you consider shifts in the way we view female sexual freedom since the introduction of the pill and the feminist revolution, and think of the the more open attitudes toward sexual orientation, you can see that there have been substantive changes in these areas of morality.

These shifts are all happening because of the rapid social and cultural changes in our society brought about by the shift away from a farm economy to an industrial, then the electronic information and global economy. The changes in every facet of life have been breathtaking.

So, ezshooter, IMO, if things seem different, it is because they are different. They will keep right on changing with every year and decade and century that passes.

Blatham and Fishin, I'm hanging breathless on each new post in your progressing argument.

blatham - You again, mince terms and attempt to define what I mean and mistate things in doing so. I have very clearly seperated "Ethics" and "morals" in my posts so how could I have used ethics to mean morals? I didn't. The definition you use for ethics (above) is a description of an "ethics class" as may be found in a college course listing. It isn't a definition of ethics itself.

Philosophy 101:
"Values" are composed of personal beliefs and attitudes towards those issues that a person thinks are important. Values shape personal morals, which, in turn, impact behavior. For instance, most people value honesty, openness and integrity. These values represent a vision of what a person wishes to be but do not specifically dictate how they should act.

"Morals" are guidelines that humans set up to try and follow in order to promote, rather than diminish, certain values. If we value honesty, then we do certain things to uphold the value such as speaking truthfully, not stealing, etc. Thus, to determine morals one must evaluate how following certain personal guidelines actually promote, rather than diminish, certain values.

"Ethics" are SYSTEMS of moral principles and rules that become standards for personal and professional conduct. They are a piecing together of ALL OF an individuals values and morals into one complete PERSONAL system.

"Law" is as a binding custom or practice of a community: a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority. Laws are statements of how people ought to act or refrain from acting; they are rules directed to members of a society telling them how they ought to behave in specific circumstances. While laws are usually based on moral foundations, if they are to have any credibility, they represent the rules that society thinks are most important. Central to all good law is equality, or the notion that the law should apply to everyone no matter his or her status or importance.

Note here that ONLY "Laws" are binding and enforceable by anyone outside of the individual. Morals and Ethics are not. Both morals and ethics are matters of personal view. Laws are not.

In an ideal world our values, morals, ethics and laws would all align perfectly. Most of us value life and consider murder to be both morally and ethically wrong and as a society we have created laws to prohibit murder. Laws however, can also be immoral and/or unethical. Many people see laws permitting the death penalty and abortion in that very light. What any one indivdual sees as "immoral" or "unethical" behavior can also very well be entirely legal.

Now, as I said in my original post in this thread. Corporations can not make ethical or moral decisions. It isn't possible because both are PERSONAL guidelines.

You want to keep bring LAWS into this discussion but that isn't the discussion here and is something that I have not addressed at all. The discussion is ETHICS.

Now, to address your point "So, laws address acts. One shouldn't expect to find any law regarding corporate behavior if corporations are not considered capable of commiting acts. Yet we find many such laws, eg. regarding monopolies."

Yes, we do find such laws covering monopolies. In the US the law is in Title 15, Chapter 1, Section 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations. As written the laws reads:

"Monopolizing trade a felony; penalty

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court."

The law addresses the acts of PERSONS. The acts prohibited by the law are all committed by individuals, alone or conspiring with other individuals (individuals acting within a corporation would meet the "combining" standard). There is a liability stipulated if those persons combine or conspire with other people and individually.

The law, quite explicity, recognizes that "Corporations" are a collection of individual people which is exactly what my original statement in this thread said.

fishin

Thank you. I'm sure we'll bump into each other again.

The actions of a corporate entity is still perceived as the actions of the executives who run it. Stock holders certainly don't provide the directives, middle management only performs them as well as the workers at the bottom. Middle management has always been the classic scapegoat.
Written (a policy decision on a memo is included) or unwritten (a verbal directive on a policy decision in a closed conferance involving two or more people) becomes a corporate policy decision. It is these decisions that drives the corporation as an entity -- into the right path or the wrong path. Transgressions can be civil or criminal, but they both involved ethics. It's the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law -- decisions involving right and wrong may be the idea of an individual but they end up being the decision of the collective as those at the top have to agree. Those at the bottom don't have to agree -- they can quit and/or become whistleblowers. Someone at the top can become a whistleblower, often to save their own ass. I realize there some general semantics involved here (is a chair still a chair if it is upside down). Think of a corporation as a country -- we should go to war with just their leaders but we end up going to war with the country. Stop and think about it, how are corporations organized in the first place? Seems perculiarly like the plan for a communist or at least a totalitarian government. The workers and stockholders should have more influence on what the executives do. It kind of looks like when one invests in a company by buying stock, including the employees, that they are the faceless entity and isn't it obvious that they are the ones who get screwed when the executives collectively plan to deceive?

Ethis should be something one doesn't throw out the window as one rises in a company hierachy. But it is beginning to seem like that is how it works. Like the Peter Principal only worse.

Hi fellow Husker. I graduated from NU in 1971. What is wrong with the football team this year?

Here's a related quote:

"Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country." Samuel Butler

Great quote, Craven. It is where a country as a society places the bar as to what is illegal in morality and ethics. We do have to be careful not to become an oppresive government by too frequently trying to define in stone what is immoral (which has a lot to do with there being a victim outside of the individual act) and ethics (what is appropriate oversight and what is too intrusive). It's a difficult balancing act that can render one a black eye trying to be the forceful mediator. That's why it's approached in government with a tip-toe-through-the-tulips approach instead of really bold legislation. I believe when an entity or individual misbehaves, you do have to send them a message and it may seem overzealous at the time but until everyone get's that message, it does work. Where I veer off of this "individual" concept is when one person in a corporation can't be keynoted as the one problem. In an anti-trust suit, let's consider that it is Microsoft that is being examined and punished as the company policy is difficult to pin-point down to one person. It's the group of people that are in control, which in essence becomes the corporate entity as a whole. That was the objection to the Arthur Anderson prosecution -- but don't the underlings end up paying for what the hierarchy dictated was an ethical standard? You can't tell me that some at the bottom didn't have a sense that something was drastically askew in that case. So it goes with war as well. We battle the country, not the populace but in the end the populace ends up taking probably more blame than they deserve. There nationalism and then there is corporatism. These are too often blind loyalties where an abstract entity is all but being worshipped and the leaders tolerated. That's definitely loaded as there is such a thing as blind loyalties to a leader. Kenneth Lay commanded that worship from too many of Enron's employees. The only one someone should be loyal to is their present significant other, their children and their parents, and we all know how morals and ethics play in that game.