What is evil – business edition

To be evil is to be profoundly immoral. It’s not just about lapses in judgement, it’s about intent. Not caring who you hurt or that you hurt others.

In business, as in life, there are people who are profoundly immoral. They use their businesses to enrich themselves and hurt others.  These are not good businessmen. They are “evil” immoral businessmen.  They are the people who give capitalism a bad name so that we now associate capitalism with exploitation.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Most people are basically moral. Some people are super moral. Most people go along with the flow. Many people are opportunistically immoral but only a small number are profoundly immoral.

We need to be aware of how we, as humans, respond to the leadership around us. It is well known that most employees mimic the behavior of their bosses. The boss sets the cultural expectation and employees set out to meet it.

If a boss bullies, the staff bullies. If a boss steals, the staff steal. This doesn’t make the copy cats profoundly immoral, they are just adjusting themselves to the cultural expectations of the organization they find themselves in.  They themselves may be moral, but their sense of right and wrong is adjusted based on the group they are in. Some research to understand how group think works.  http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm

Before you think – couldn’t happen to me – it could and it probably has. After all, if you were brainwashed would you even know it? Most of the time, brain washing and group think is only obvious to an outside observer. It is the rare individual who doesn’t succumb to peer pressure and group think maintaining a sense of self to the point they can stand against the group and the pressure the group exerts to maintain the faulty views they have.

Bad bosses and bad morals lead to bad decisions. It benefits us all to make good decisions and to do that, we need to get rid of people who are profoundly immoral who are steering us off course.

Good leaders take care to make sure that they don’t fall into group think traps. Not just because it’s the right thing to do but because they know how easy it is to get manipulated into doing bad while thinking you are doing good.

The main thing we all can do to defend ourselves from becoming victims of group think in favor of a profoundly immoral individual is to be skeptical.  Play devil’s advocate with yourself and others.

Nothing is inherently immoral

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it. Jean Anouilh

Humanist ethics are situational ethics. And this makes a lot of people nervous. But it shouldn’t.

Humans all value the same things – for the most part. We value justice, compassion, and responsibility for instance. Studies have shown that there is indeed a common set of widely held human values.

Where these values come from is a matter of debate, obviously. But to me, as a pragmatist, I’m less interested in why we have these values than on how we apply them.  This is why I’m an advocate of situational ethics.

The reality we all face is that while we share common human values, those values are often in conflict with one another. Also, as individuals, given our personal experiences and beliefs, we may value some values higher then we value others.  We are constantly weighing our values to come to what we think are ethical decisions. Even if we don’t realize we do this – we are.

All situational ethics is, is an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of how we humans go about making moral decisions. The reason we do this is so that we can more effectively balance our moral values when making decisions.  We do this because it seems to yield better more moral decisions as judged by the real world effects of our decisions. We do less harm inadvertently when  we take such an explicit approach BECAUSE we considered the possibility that we might do harm while trying to do good.

Let that sink in for a moment. We might do harm while trying to do good. It doesn’t matter what your morality is or how it is based. If you aren’t willing to consider this possibility that you might accidentally do harm while trying to do good and you aren’t willing to think through how you might do the most good with the least harm, then you aren’t doing moral reasoning right.

I started this essay by saying nothing is inherently moral. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. It just means you have to THINK through the potential consequences of your actions before taking action to insure your decisions are good and moral and will do the most good and least harm.

And this brings us back to the topic of leadership. Want to be a good moral and just leader?  Take the time to think through your actions to ensure you actually do good because good intentions aren’t enough. They never are.  Moral reasoning is hard. Put some effort into it.

Learn more about how to make more moral decisions with Planning for Personal Success – online course - https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/