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RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS ETHICS: AN ANTHOLOGY. Edited by
Thomas O’Brien and Scott Paeth. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2006.
Pp. 381. $72.00. ISBN: 0-742-55010-9.
In March, 2000, Michael Kopper, Andy Fastow’s top aide, walked
into Kristina Mordaunt’s office. Mordaunt, an Enron in-house lawyer,
had worked on several earlier Fastow transactions. Through Kopper,
Fastow now offered her an opportunity to invest less than $10,000 in a
new deal, code-named Southampton. In the new transaction, a Fastow
partnership would pay a token amount to buy a company loaded with
valuable Enron stock. Then the partnership’s owners would sell the
stock and divvy up the profits. Kopper didn’t provide Mordaunt with
any of this detail and she didn’t ask questions. With Kopper standing
there, Mordaunt quickly made up her mind. She said “yes.” Within the
month, Mordaunt would “invest” about $5800. Less than two months
later, she received back $1,040,744.
Late in 2001, Mordaunt would end up confessing her role in
Fastow’s gambit and would be fired by Enron. As Conspiracy of Fools
described her original chat with Kopper, “The conversation that would
destroy Mordaunt’s career had lasted all of two minutes.” 1
What does Mordaunt’s story have to do with this new work,
Religious Perspectives on Business Ethics, edited by Thomas O’Brien
and Scott Paeth? Read on.
Mordaunt’s decision, along with the increased regulation of
lawyers post-Enron, suggests that lawyers should pay more attention to
questions of business ethics. O’Brien and Paeth’s anthology is a useful
work to bring lawyers up to speed on the state of the academic dialogue
on philosophy, religion and business ethics. Covering a canvas broad
enough to encompass Confucian Trustworthiness, Virtue Ethics in
Business, Zen in the Workplace and Jewish Environmental Ethics, (vi)
the work lays a legitimate claim to representing most, if not all, of
what’s ethically topical today on campus.
Any canvas this broad presents readers with both challenges and
opportunities. For highly interested or very curious readers, this book is
the ultimate cafeteria. In one stop, these readers can gain a useful
exposure to most recent developments in business ethics theory and the
1. Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story 324 (Random House 2005).
101
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dialogue among philosophy and multiple religious traditions. It is hard,
however, to uncover any systematic approach to the subject. Teachers
interested in presenting a coherent ethical framework rather than a
survey will have to pick a focus, exercise selectivity and dive deep into
individual essays.
Many of the essays are quite insightful within their chosen
boundaries. Scott Paeth’s opening A Brief Introduction to Ethical
Theory is a succinct and valuable overview of modern philosophy’s
search for ethical grounding. Businessmen with a bent to ponder the
foundations of their company ethics policy will find this essay’s
categories and distinctions useful. Paeth explains the different ethical
questions that provide the respective anchors of different ethical
systems: 1) deontology (dealing with issues of duty and obligation); 2)
teleology (dealing with the end goals of ethics and the consequences of
decisions); and 3) contextual and virtue ethics (concerned with
appropriate behavior under a given set of circumstances). These
distinctions can be helpful for understanding the goals and obligations
expressed by a firm’s ethics policy and the nature of criticisms leveled at
corporations by various groups.
In a second essay, Religious Ethics and the Practice of Business,
Paeth goes on to provide a useful reminder of the moral framework that
shaped Adam Smith’s work. Citing at length the very passage from The
Wealth of Nations that is usually quoted as extolling self-interest, Paeth
clarifies that Smith’s views were complex, that they incorporated the
sentiment Smith labeled “benevolence,” and that they saw the necessity
of society imposing a framework of justice around business. Perhaps
most interesting, the quote makes clear that the type of self-interest
Smith saw as useful involved what today would be called “win/win”
deal making:
Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do
this [interest their self-love in his favor]. Give me that which I
want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of
every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one
another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in
need of. (24)
Because other contributors work from a simple premise that profit
maximization must collide with justice (see for example, Duska, 59-60),
Paeth’s work is a helpful reminder that the theoretical foundations of
capitalism are both more nuanced and receptive to being surrounded by
laws crafted to promote justice.
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Despite the reference to Religious Perspectives in the title, this
book is only intermittently interested in how religion speaks to business
ethics. In part, this reflects the success philosophy has had in banishing
religion from the discussion. Indeed, one author, Paul F. Camenisch,
devotes his essay to answering the question of whether there is even a
legitimate role for religious contributions. Although his answer does
much to establish that philosophy exhibits many of the same problems
cited to disqualify religion, he could have done more to demonstrate
what religion specifically brings to the discussion.
In part, religion’s uncertain trumpet on business ethics stems from
a certain disdain with which many Christian denominations regard
business. Paeth captures this well in his second essay. Discussing the
Catholic bishops’ 1984 Pastoral Letter, Economic Justice for All, he
summarizes the bishops’ stance as calling on business “to work toward
the improvement of the whole society rather than concerning themselves
solely with matters of profit.” (28) Paeth goes on to declare this stance
to be at the heart of the Catholic moral tradition, the Protestant social
gospel movement and numerous other religious traditions.
Just so. In adopting this stance towards business, the Catholic
bishops and like-minded critics abstract away critical realities,
including:
• that the primary task of business is to create goods/services
desired by the public;
• that business needs to adapt and innovate in order to
survive competitively;
• that business contributes massively to the improvement of
society by generating dynamic growth and its
accompanying benefits, job and wealth creation;
• that business enables government and non-profit groups at
all levels to care for the disadvantaged via taxes paid and
corporate philanthropy.
Some added measure of religion’s disdain for business is taken by
Laura Nash in her essay, The Brave New World of Business Ethics?
Here Nash writes:
In this search for religious relevance and deeper spirituality, many
businesspeople are going it alone, convinced their churches are irrationally
hostile to business or ignorant of the roles and responsibilities that go with
the territory. . . . Even when these business leaders are close to their pastors
on a personal level, their conversations rarely penetrate the realms in which
they . . . operate. (175)
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Nash then provides specific examples of businesspeople, many of
them evangelicals, who have been deeply influenced by their religious
tradition and have chosen to redefine corporate goals and practices in its
light.
Citing companies like ServiceMaster and R.W. Beckett
Corporation, she illustrates how their CEOs have leavened quality,
reliability, progressive employee policies and community outreach with
their religious perspectives.
Nash’s work also highlights another point—that the
religious/business ethics discussion seems to occur in an empirical
vacuum. Nash’s essay is one of the few that touches on business
conditions and company examples. Essays containing primarily
empirical analysis are wholly absent. Nowhere is there to be found an
essay delving into, for example, the statistical correlation between
fraudulent accounting and high debt levels or comparing the financial
performance of firms with avowedly religious statements of purpose
with a comparable sample of those with no such statements. O’Brien
and Paeth might want to consider incorporating more empirical
ethics/business performance studies in a future volume. They also might
want to consider soliciting more contributions from businesspeople.
From the descriptions of the Editors/Contributors at the end of the book,
only one of twenty-one authors appears to have had business experience.
This fact testifies to the grip in which university philosophy departments
have heretofore held the business ethics field.
The lack of empirical material points towards a more fundamental
issue with the book—its seeming indifference to how to promote
sounder ethical “formation” of people going into business. In the wake
of Enron, there was some hand-wringing among business school deans
over whether their schools had failed at ethical formation. This brings
us back to Kristina Mordaunt. She had less than two minutes to make
what would prove a life-altering decision. Extended reflection was not
an option. Guided only by her ethical formation as an individual, she
would make this decision, and live with the consequences. In
Mordaunt’s case, this formation did not cause her to press Kopper for
details or buy time for ethical reflection.
Formation is a term familiar to most religious traditions. It
expresses the perspective that the spiritual and moral life is not simply a
product of rational analysis. Rather, it evolves from a more complex
process, one that includes exposure to leaders who exemplify a mastery
of life challenges; it also involves encountering thinking that illuminates
difficulties and inspires the effort to overcome them. Finally, formation
involves seeking out experiences wherein individuals, under guidance,
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test and prove themselves.
Surveys of the horizon make at best a marginal contribution to this
kind of ethical formation. Indeed, it can be argued they impede it by
inadvertently conveying the impression that there is no consensus on
anything—no agreement on the foundations for ethics, or how to
translate abstract principles into concrete business actions, or on whether
one approach seems to be working better than all others.
In this regard, perhaps the most promising essay is by Martin
Calkins. Entitled Casuistry and the Business Case Method, (149) it
points to the possibility of drawing systematic lessons in business ethics
from a rigorous assessment of business ethics case studies. Taking the
case method as pioneered by Harvard Business School, Calkins shows
how the virtual “library” of cases now in existence could be mined for
guidance. Casuistry, a method with a long and rich history within
theology, provides tested tools for distilling lessons and rules of conduct
from concrete cases.
Following up on Calkins’ suggestions involves the possibility of
producing guidance suitable for instructing tomorrow’s businesspeople.
Moreover, it would be guidance grounded in concrete examples to
which businesspeople can relate. Hopefully, O’Brien and Paeth can
build on this promising start and produce a future volume with more of
this content.
Stephen V. Arbogast *
* Executive Professor, C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, Houston,
Texas.