An ethical code helps to lead a fruitful life

By Lionel Wijesiri

Suppose you run a building construction company. You receive a bid from a sub-contractor, which you find to be 25 percent lower when compared with the lowest bidder of the lot. You realise it is a mistake that could put the sub-contractor out of business within months. But accepting it will improve your chance of winning the contract for a big apartment block project. What would you do?

You are a property developer. You buy a medium sized hotel planning to expand it. Six months later you realise that it isn’t going to return a profit. Investors have already sent you letters of consent to get in on the deal. What would you do?

What do you do when ethical principles seem to collide with the bottom line? The scenarios quoted, which represent this kind of a dilemma, actually happened in two small companies.

What is it?

Ethics is related to our beliefs, our conduct, our values, our standards, our principles, our morals, our ideals and our integrity.

We have to be above board and open, to be conscientious - not just act but put one’s heart into it, to be equitable and fair in our affairs, to adopt a moral stance, but to live this out, too, to be virtuous and to put them into practice, to be honourable, loyal and supporting, to live a life of sharing and contribution.

A heavy list indeed, one might say. Yet, for any right- thinking person interested in a purposeful life and how to get the most out of it and how to contribute, then it seems ethics has much to offer.

Influence

We begin to learn ethics through their interactions with family. The parents, siblings and other family members are parts of society, and the way they interact with a child can have a profound influence on the child’s ethical standpoint.

For example, in a loving family in which sharing and care for others is emphasised, a child may learn compassion and selflessness and develop an ethical standard that involves giving and care for others.

Our ethics will be even more strongly influenced by educational institutions. In the school, children learn how to interact with others. They learn about sharing, collaboration, commitment to others and how to communicate. Ethical behaviour is rewarded, while unethical behaviour is punished or discouraged.

Then they move on to the society and get exposed to the media - television, radio, the Internet, cinema, the newspaper and cultural events. Although most media are not intended to directly teach or influence ethics, there is often a side effect of communicating ethical values.

For example, a television sitcom can carry messages about how our society feels about certain situations such as work relationships, marriage, friendship, poverty or how to behave towards strangers.

Religious institutions, from churches and mosques to Buddhist temples and religious societies also have a profound effect on the ethical beliefs of individuals.

Religious institutions have the explicit goal of teaching people how to live ethical lives as perceived by the religious hierarchy. The values and ethical standards are imparted by religious elders and teachers, by community and group events and by religious texts and teachings.

With much maturity comes exposure to a wider sense of the world and its flaws. The ethics learned at home and in school and religious institute do not always mesh with the reality of the larger society. They see how ethics go wrong everywhere, whether the Government sector or corporate sector. What they read, see and experience can eventually lead to cynicism about ethics.

Philosopher’s point

Fifty years ago, most philosophers thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways: by discovering what our religions wanted us to do, or by thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems.

They thought that if a person did this properly they would be led to the right conclusion. But now even philosophers are less sure that it’s possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics - at least not one that leads to conclusions.

Modern thinkers often teach that ethics leads people not to conclusions but to ‘decisions’. In this view, the role of ethics is limited to clarifying ‘what’s at stake’ in particular ethical problems.

Philosophy can help identify the range of ethical methods, conversations and value systems that can be applied to a particular problem. But after these things have been made clear, each person must make their own individual decision as to what to do, and then react appropriately to the consequences.

Five principles

Just as a house needs a strong foundation so that it can do what it was meant to do, society needs a strong moral foundation to function effectively. The most fundamental building block of any society is Principle No. 1: Do no harm.

This is both the most important of the five ethical or ‘life’ principles and the easiest to put into action. It is the most important, because we would live in constant fear if we could not trust others to take the principle seriously.

The rest of the ethical principles are: make things better, respect others, be fair and be compassionate. These five principles reveal the secret to living a rich, satisfying, and happy life, and we have known about them for more than 5,000 years. Every religious tradition in the world teaches them, as do parents in every country.

Striving for the ethical edge sometimes calls for letting an opportunity slip-by or incurring a short-term financial loss. The entrepreneur involved in the two scenarios listed in the beginning of the article did not worry about it. The first person called the subcontractor and said, ‘Look I am not going to tell you what your competitors bids are, but your number is very low - in my opinion, too low.’

Good deed

The subcontractor withdrew his bid. The brighter end of the story is that thereafter for every bid he received from the subcontractor there was two to five percent reduction, perhaps in acknowledgement of the initial good deed.

The entrepreneur in the second scenario, sold the hotel back to the bank for cover the price of the loan. In return, the bank got a neat profit by way of the amount the entrepreneur had sunk into renovations. The investors were informed of the true situation and politely returning their letters of consent. The entrepreneur absorbed the balance big loss.

Nevertheless, he had reason for optimism. Much to the company’s ethical handling of the affair prompted an outpouring of letters from clients commending the firm’s honesty and expressing they are looking forward to mutual corporation in future.

The two stories remind me of Edmund Burke who once said, ‘All that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good [people] to do nothing.’ When we witness someone else doing something they shouldn’t be doing, it may be easier to do nothing, but the easiest thing to do isn’t always the right thing to do.