The following is from Rushworth Kidder's recent Commentary in Ethics Newsline:
Have Americans, by separating these two books [by Adam Smith], also confused history with philosophy? Maybe, in our minds, we’ve merged the twin events of 1776, seeing The Wealth of Nations as synonymous with the American Revolutionary War. Maybe it was a misreading of that book that led us, at the end of the twentieth century, to launch a bizarre and tragic experiment: to see whether we could deliberately create a form of capitalism absent any moral content.
That experiment has run its course. We now know that it indeed can be done, but only at grave risk to the economy and to free enterprise itself. The real danger of the ethics recession is not the current economic collapse. It is that unless we restore the moral underpinnings of capitalism, the very freedom that makes capitalism possible may be swept away on waves of public moral outrage. Reinserting ethics into business, then, is no mere luxury. It’s essential to our survival as a wealth-creating nation. But then, Adam Smith could have told us that.
For the entire article: http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2009/05/04/must-capitalism-be-moral/
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Oath of Ethics at Harvard B-School
The following is excerpted The New York Times May 29, 2009
A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality
By Leslie Wayne
When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
What happened to making money?
That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
For the rest of the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/business/30oath.html?em
A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality
By Leslie Wayne
When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
What happened to making money?
That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
For the rest of the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/business/30oath.html?em
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