You probably have a good grasp of what it means to be ethical. Most of us live life according to our own set of principles and values. And even if we can't eloquently put our own moral “code” into words, we certainly know unethical behavior when we see it.
So why highlight ethical awareness as a future skill? It's partly because of the changing nature of work. The digital transformation and wave of fourth industrial revolution technologies have given rise to a whole new set of ethical challenges to overcome—think of the dilemmas surrounding gene editing, for example, or artificial intelligence, or the use of people's personal data. Then there's the huge potential fallout from ethical missteps in today's world, where scandals can spread across the internet faster than you can say TikTok.
As we'll see in this chapter, businesses are rapidly cottoning on to ethics as a critical issue, which means they'll increasingly want to hire the kinds of people who can help them address ethical challenges.
Ethics can be described as your moral principles or values. To be ethical is to be conscientious about your choices—at work, and in everyday life—and to act with good intentions in mind. In this way, ethics is concerned with questions such as:
Ethics provides us with a moral roadmap of sorts. It gives us the tools to think about moral issues and guide our decision-making. And this can span anything from how we feel about abortion and capital punishment to the food that we eat and the products that we buy.
Speaking of issues like abortion and capital punishment, it's clear that ethics doesn't necessarily provide us with clear-cut answers; people often have different views on what's morally “right,” and some issues are just plain messy or ambiguous. Ethics, then, is a sort of framework that helps us to decide for ourselves what's right and what's wrong.
The fact that one person's idea of ethical behavior differs from another's hasn't stopped philosophers coming up with ethical theories to tell right from wrong. For example, there's “virtue ethics,” which states that living an ethical life means demonstrating virtues such as compassion and courage (virtue ethics considers traits like jealousy and selfishness to be unethical). Or there's the “utilitarianism” theory of ethics, which says that to be ethical is to maximize the amount of happiness around you and minimize the suffering.
Although the specifics may vary from person to person and theory to theory, ethics is ultimately about considering the interests of others, as opposed to serving our own desires to the detriment of others. To think ethically, then, is to think about more than yourself. It's to think about the common good.
If ethics is a set of principles that guide our decision-making and behavior, it's pretty clear that this is just as important in a business context as it is in everyday life. An ethical business is one that tells the truth, keeps its promises to customers and employees, treats people with respect, takes responsibility for its actions, and, ideally, aims to contribute something to the common good. An unethical business is one that puts profit above all other concerns, to the detriment of its employees, customers, society, and our world.
Ethical awareness in a business context therefore starts with thinking about the effect of business decisions on customers, employees, and other stakeholders (and yes, I'd include the environment as a stakeholder). Looking a little wider than that, ethical awareness also encompasses the organization's overall values, beliefs, and culture. Looking even wider, business ethics often means regulatory compliance—some laws, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are designed to ensure companies behave in a certain way (in this case, to prevent fraud). Other legal examples include environmental standards, minimum wage laws, and health and safety laws.
Bringing all this together, perhaps the best way to define business ethics is as a system that guides the values, beliefs, decisions, and behaviors of an organization and the people who work in it. For this to happen, ethics needs to be embedded into the very fabric of the organization, starting with ethical leaders who set the tone for how the business should behave. This then filters down so that everyone in the company has a clear idea on what's right and wrong (in terms of decision-making and conduct).
New technologies bring with them ethical concerns that can be tricky to address. AI is one of those technologies that presents significant ethical challenges, such as data bias and data privacy (see Chapter 2)—not to mention the morality of asking machines to make important decisions (which in the case of something like healthcare could mean life-and-death decisions). Gene editing is another technology that can be fraught with ethical dilemmas, such as who decides which genetic traits are “normal” and which are abnormal? Or could gene editing ultimately make society less accepting of people who are different?
Industries need people with ethical awareness to help them navigate these murky waters and ensure that technology is used for the benefit of all. This is why more and more businesses are hiring ethicists, and I'm not just talking about tech companies. The US Army, for example, has a chief AI ethics officer (as part of the army's artificial intelligence task force) who advises the army on incorporating ethics into AI design. If you raised an eyebrow at that, consider the potential implications of AI systems making decisions on, for example, target sites for drone attacks. To what extent should machines be involved in such decisions and where do we draw the line between AI-led efficiency and our moral responsibility as human beings? Companies of all types will be grappling with similar sorts of questions, such as “How can we get the best out of AI, while ensuring the well-being of our employees, customers, and other stakeholders?” and “Does this usage violate people's individual right to privacy?” and “Does this provide genuine value for the people we serve?”
All things considered, although ethical awareness is nothing new, I expect it to rise in importance in the coming years as society grapples with the potential uses and impacts of new technologies.
Aside from the rise of new technologies, there are many reasons why ethical awareness matters now more than ever, not least because of the huge potential backlash when businesses get it wrong.
There's a rich history of businesses making ethical missteps. Think of any big corporate scandal and chances are it stems from some sort of ethical violation, whether it's financial misconduct, child labor, mistreatment of employees (or even customers), discrimination, lack of transparency, or whatever.
Remember that video of a bloodied passenger being dragged off an overbooked United Airlines flight after he declined to be bumped from the flight that he had booked and paid for? Yep, that's exactly the sort of thing that sticks in people's minds. While the airline was well within its rights to ask a passenger to leave an overbooked flight, the brutal optics of it all, not to mention the company's subsequent apology (which lacked any real sense of remorse), created an overall impression of a company that doesn't think too highly of its customers. Such reputational damage can be enormously harmful to the bottom line. In the immediate aftermath of that United video, $250 million was wiped off the company's market value.1
Or there's the Equifax breach, in which the personal data of 148 million customers was stolen by hackers, yet the company failed to report the breach for two months—a huge scandal that ultimately resulted in the company agreeing to pay up to $700 million in compensation.2 Or there's British online fast fashion retailer Boohoo, which was embroiled in a scandal about working conditions in its factories—after which the company's share price almost halved.3
Why do ethical scandals have such a big financial impact? I think it's because we as humans are generally turned off by hypocrisy. Businesses talk all the time about “living their values” and being authentic. So when a business says they act a certain way and then we clearly see them doing something else, it leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths. As a result, we're more likely to take our money elsewhere. Indeed, 43 percent of consumers have stopped buying from a business because of unethical practices.4
Ethics also matters from an employer brand perspective because—no real surprise here—people want to work for ethical companies. Consider this: 73 percent of people say they wouldn't work for a company unless its values aligned with their own, and 82 percent would rather take a pay cut to work at an ethical company than get paid more to work somewhere with iffy ethics.5 In other words, an ethical business is much more likely to attract the very best talent.
All this shows why ethics matters to businesses, which means it matters to us all as individuals who want to build successful careers. With ethics being high on the corporate agenda, it makes sense that businesses will want to hire people who have a strong ethical awareness, and who can act with ethical values in mind. Therefore, brushing up on your ethical awareness is a smart career move.
What's more, being ethically aware helps you live your own values, and stay true to what's important to you. It can help you weigh up difficult situations, at work and in everyday life, and make decisions that are right for you (circle back to Chapter 6 for more on decision-making).
Let's start with some tips for individuals, before moving on to how businesses can boost ethical awareness.
In this chapter, we've learned that:
I've already mentioned how ethical businesses rely on ethical leaders. Integrity is a vital skill in any leader—without integrity, it's very hard for people to respect their leaders (that goes for society at large, not just organizational leaders). Turn to the next chapter and let's drill into some other qualities that make for a great leader.