Of what use are core values in guilding the ethical decisions and actions of organization members?

Question

About business ethics

Answer 1

As Julius Ceasar remarked in the Gallic Wars, "O Tempore! O Mores!"

It is amazing to even see this question, with the results of a defeciency of such values in the news every day.

How did Enron happen? Basically because the core values of honesty, truth, and fair dealing were completely absent. In their place was personal gain and glory. Whether or not there was any responsibility among the shareholders and employees for ignorance, willing blindness, or actually embracing the values that led to the fall is debateable, but the bottom line is that people without those core values achieved positions of power somehow.

Remember the Pinto? A corporate decision was knowingly made to produce a dangerously defective product, as the cost of the wrongful death lawsuits was calculated to cost less than correcting the defect. People died, and the board knew this would happen.

Does this find its way into non-profit endeavors? I think there's a lack of core values involved when religious leaders molest children, so I'd say yes.

How about politics? When the person chosen as a representative by the people is too busy rescuing cash from a freezer to participate in the emergency response, I think that says something about core values. When he's re-elected, that says something about the people that elected him. It says we may have reached a sort of tipping point where adherence to core values of ethics may be counterproductive, excluding one from a position of power to actually do anything constructive.

This is not a question of greed, its a question of where one sees their own self interest. Its one thing to try to maximize profits, because that's what people are hired in companies to do. Its another to do so with decisions that one doesn't intend to ever become public, because they don't want the victims to ever know they are victims. That's true whether we're talking about watering whisky at a bar, or selling dangerous products, or deceiving investors or voters.

If one doesn't have core values they are willing to have made public, and adhere to despite the personal cost, then the intention is for someone else to pay the cost, possibly those that put a person with such shortsighted and communally destructive values in place.

It's really sad that we could reach the point where a person could actually ask this question without being facetious.

How did we get to a place where this question could even occur to someone.