In recent years there has been much discussion about the ability of ethics to construct a lasting foundation for corporate cultures for businesses and institutions. The desired result should hopefully be greater stability in a turbulent economy; and a common framework which makes it easier to decentralize decision making and responsibility. It should therefore be possible to act faster and more effectively on local problems. In this extension to Ole Thyssen's article on "Ethics as Second Order Morality" in the first issue of this journal and Per Thygesen Poulsen's article in no. 2/3: "Turbulence and Responsibility" I will go a step further than just talking about a company's or an institution's relationship to its employees, customers and the surrounding society to talking about its relation to the environment in a global perspective.1
To behave decently towards nearly everyone is a part of what we in our culture regard as good behavior. A common understanding of what it means to behave properly is an important civilizing element in any society. We all know that at times it can be very difficult to be wellbehaved. But we have also learned to believe that in long term it is worth the trouble, if only for the sake of culture and civilization.
The basis of the democratic culture's conception of good behavior is the view that other people are unique and free beings with the same inherent qualities, aspirations and rights as oneself. This has as a consequence that one can never characterize another person fully via some kind of assessment scale, such as work ability or intelligence. As a unique being each person is of infinite value. This does not mean that we cannot in principal always be replaced as workers precisely because of the limitations of the situation.
Uniqueness and freedom have as their consequence that one can never regard other people merely as means, but must always treat them as ends in themselves. As beings they have the fundamental authority to define their existence and its meaning themselves, including their own values and their morality. And that entails simultaneously that we must respect other people to do the same. In this way it becomes not morality but ethics - understood as the meta-discussion of morals and how they can function together in a common system which is the universal basis for any discussion of values. We must therefore accept that we can find no universal morality. There are many ways of defining and composing an assessment scale within the given ethical limits. The consequence of this is that when one would fix a common morality for others, as for example with the introduction of a corporate culture, then it must be developed through discussion. If one "bosses" one's morality through, then one oversteps fundamental ethical rules. It is exactly these rules that are the foundation of our democratic form of society.
This of course does not mean that one must not try to persuade others through a rhetorical praising of the beauty, rationality or effectiveness of one's own values. Neither does this mean that one necessarily must be completely in agreement with everyone on all details. But it does mean that it is necessary for each person to find an acceptable and constructive form of working relationship.
The difficulty with the use of discussion as a medium is, that it demands an awareness of one's own values, an ability to formulate them clearly, and to accept that this is just one way out of many to do so. The three things go together since an explicit formulation always demands a larger logical constancy than meanings and feelings and strives to distinguish one's point of view from that of others. Such an awareness of one's own opinions of people, society and the world is decisive for being able to use one's values creatively as a manager. The management of free and responsible individuals, e.g. through a management or corporate culture, presupposes such a formulation and awareness.
Management today is becoming a more generalized field of human activity. Specialists can only deliver pieces of the jig-saw puzzle, often too few, plus some that do not fit. The role of management will be to set limits to the specialist's work, to define the whole. The manager must first of all work with large quantities of information. The task is to reduce the almost limitless amount of information and degrees of freedom (possible actions and choices). This can happen through rational considerations, technical as well as economic and judicial. But the technicaljudicial-economic rationality is in itself not enough in a modern information society. The aesthetic and ethical demands are coming increasingly into focus as an important parameter in that decision process to reduce complexity for specific decisions and for actions. Decisions are founded on values values that spring from our own humanity, our consciousness. To a considerable degree we create the world we live in through our aesthetical views and ethical discussions and dispositions with our peers.
Ethical consciousness is precisely the instance that should guarantee the relationship between part and whole. As a part of our culture, we have developed an overall ethic that considers the individual and provides rules for the relationship between different moralities and interests through human rights and the idea of the hegemony-free discussion. Consequently, corp- orate cultures should develop that build on mutual responsibility. It is a question of making the values visible, the values that are contained in long-term responsibility, in cooperation with all stakeholders.
We must learn to express our basic values in a way that allows us to enter into a dialogue with the values that are expressed through the economic and scientific power-languages. This is if we are to maintain our humanity as human beings in an international multi-faceted culture based on democracy, human rights, and a more or less free market, then we are obliged to bring power, money, rationality and values into fruitful dialogue. These domains often function in their own closed systems in modern society.
The problem in the global market of the global city is not just to behave decently in relationship to what our culture has implanted in us. In a global perspective the task is much more radical, namely to consider if we as a culture behave with propriety towards other cultures and the environment. Even if we act locally, we will be judged globally!
This, as far as it goes, is what we have always have had to. But it has become more urgent over the last few years, because the world and the market in increasing degree have undergone - not just an internationalization - but a globalization. This is because our technology has become so powerful that we can and actually do undertake actions that have global range, such as sending carbon dioxide, sulphur and ozone disintegrating materials into the atmosphere, or spreading radioactive isotopes over the whole planet when our atomic energy plants break down.
The starving children in the third world, increasing desert growth in Africa, famines, the spread of AIDS and the increasing number of pollution problems and accidents turns up not only in the medias' collective conscience, but makes itself felt directly now in the world economy, and threatens the liquidity of the international banking systems.
In a longer perspective, one can for example just mention the pollution of our own drinking water and the destruction of the lakes' and coastal waters' capability to produce fish that will influence our economy and our way of life for at least two future generations.
Thus our own economical and technical development forces us into a consciousness of this temporal and global development of consciousness. It is this, more than anything else that in reality forces us from the local morality towards a universal ethic.
Our main problem seems to be that unfortunate side effects from our way of producing and living have grown so much that it is necessary to reevaluate our "development paradigm". Our materialistic growth paradigm seems to build upon an unreasonable exploitation of nature and other cultures. The surplus production we create does not benefit the needy on anything that resembles a reasonable scale.
It is of course good to give aid to developing countries. But how much does this actually help, when we year after year in fact pull money out of the countries whose populations are starving? This we do - among other things by keeping their industrial products out with trade barriers, forcing them to export raw materials and commodities to us for falling prices. Their environmental problems increase, not least because they use "modern" agricultural methods to cultivate saleable crops to the West to enable them to pay off the interest rates of their debt to us. At the same time we show contempt for the violent nationalist and religious fundamentalist movements that arise in these developing countries, - and which cut their terrorist tracks deep into our culture, often supported by agents from our own class or ideological conflicts.
But these violent methods - although we do not accept them - cannot surprise us as long as we ourselves through our economic industrial display of power ruin the quality of life and shorten life in these countries. The North-South dialogue is still not taking place according to the basic demands of the ethical dialogue and Canada and Denmark are so far the only nations who have given land back to the original inhabitants.
We are therefore forced to a higher degree of responsibility, to think globally before we act locally and this is difficult because our society and its various offficial and private institutions are not at all geared to take such large perspectives seriously. We have a long tradition of agreeing with the futility of such universal speculations. We call it "philosophy" and "metaphysics".
The problem is that a greater part of our culture still seems to be affected by a simplified mechanical understanding of nature that leads us into the error that nature is a dead and relatively simple thing which is "outside" us, and which we - for these very same reasons - believe that we can obtain an almost complete knowledge about and control of.
But new developments in thermodynamics, quantum physics, mathematics (the theory of deterministic chaos and non-liniearity), biology etc. seem to point more clearly towards the view that a simple much less exhaustive picture of nature cannot exist. In contemporary language one can say that the amount of "information" about nature's objects is infinite, and even the information found in a single grain of sand can never be exhausted.
If one limits ones comments to our epistemological situation, we must admit - as we in our time did with religion - that not even natural science constitutes a special privileged road to the ultimate truth about reality.
If one dares to say something general about the world or reality on this basis, then one can say that this epistemological reflection is in agreement with a world view that sees the world as being infinitely complex, infinitely "deep" in its structure, or "possessing" an infinite structural wealth.
It is because of this impenetrable complexity that one cannot give a finite or exhaustive description of the world or nature in such a way that it can be used to direct or prescribe our actions witb deterministic precision.
We have therefore no special precedence in relation to other cultures when it comes to defining absolute aspects of reality. Here it is as with morality: there are many useful local models of reality. The basis for their communication and the possibility of finding constructive convivial forms is the acceptance of that none of them are universal.
It is crucial for the establishment of a new ethic that we make clear to ourselves that "the Truth" is not given by the sciences, in religion or (political) ideologies, or poetry or myths. They all add valuable aspects to enlighten what life is about, but none of them have "the Answer".
This epistemology excludes certain types of conceptions, namely those we usually call the fundamentalist. The fundamentalists are typically convinced that they have understood either the whole truth or anyway the most important parts of it and that their conception is beyond every discussion or interpretation. Amongst contemporary religions, it is at present Islam that seems most inclined to show its fundamentalist side. But our own materialistic scientific ideology combined with an atheistic rationality is also a candidate, at least if we do not open up for a discussion with other cultures!
Ecology and Ethics
Our ecological experiences have taught us that when we burn our outrageously large amounts of refuse; Dioxin is produced, which through the chain: grass, cows, women, mother's milk, breast babies, ends up in our children in overdoses. Also when we spray with DDT in Africa, the global ecological connection manifests itself in the DDT that accumulates in the penguins at the South Pole.
There is very strong ecological evidence that we have a very close connection with the rest of nature (through biogeochemical cycles in ecosystems) and through that to the other cultures and their treatment of it, and vice versa. We are ourselves an open self-organized system which is dependant on the flow of energy and material we receive from nature. Therefore environmental problems are all very important for our health.
One can actually say that our health ultimately through ecological systems and the nutrient cycles - is connected with the earth's "health". Nature does a good job "for" and "in" us which we tend to ignore in our rationalist culture.
But we have nothing on which to base our ethics in relation to our society's ecological foundation, even if we, scientifically via ecology, try to establish an extended rationality with regard to nature. Real responsibility also builds on caring, empathy and values - and thereby to a certain degree on identification. But we have lost that interdependence with nature. We have separated ourselves from nature through our culture and our technology. Therefore it is important that we reassess this subject in an ethical connection. We must learn again to commit ourselves to the unity that constitutes culture and nature.
There is no doubt that nature, with its vast complexity and dynamics can carry itself in thousands of ways, that will be in agreement with a humanly desirable existence. Therefore we can not determine a final correct, original or natural state of nature: This would be ecological fundamentalism. And this is the third of the great fundamentalist dangers that threaten our culture, in addition to the religious and the mechanical natural scientific.
We are able to determine a series of states of nature which lead to undesirable human conditions, such as the painful and limited conditions which develop when our organisms accumulate too many heavy metals, (such as mercury, lead and cadmium) or poisons such as DDT and Dioxin.
Our problem is to take the ethical and moral consequences of this knowledge into a society whose institutions are not at all geared to the necessary kind of action and cognition. It is very difficult because amongst other things we are talking about intangibles such as our responsibility towards other living creatures; the future generations and the poor in underdeveloped countries; as to what culture and the quality of life is about; and as to how we ourselves can decide the direction of development. It is clear that an embedding of environmental considerations in our economical system through the establishment of a series of environment taxes is desirable, not just on a national scale but also on a global scale combined with prohibitive legislation. But legislation in itself is not enough. There must also be an elucidation of attitudes, and the consequences they have both in the private and working lives of both the individuals and the company/institution. We often see how an individual feels trapped because society and institutions do not take clear moral and ethical stands. In our society it is not - in contrast to the fundamentalist desirable to be a martyr.
If we accept ethics as second-order morals - and with it conversation - as the forum in which the voluntary choice of values and actions should take place, then it must also apply to other peoples and nations independent of the position of power they actually have in relationship to us. And this must also apply to children, who will inhabit the world they inherit from us. Our actions must also be valued in a future perspective.
Therefore, what we need is for businesses and institutions - private as well as public - through discussion with all who work there to publically clarify their values, concerning the environment and First/Third world difficulties. In this way it will be legitimate for workers and leaders to participate creatively in producing good environmental and global cultural resonsible answers to the company's, the institutions' - and ultimately - society's problems.
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