Recode Co-founder and Editor Kara Swisher recently argued in a New York Times op-ed that perhaps companies in Silicon Valley should install “chief ethics officers” to help them deal with their many current ethical quandaries and avoid future ones. I think the kind of officers Swisher imagines would be a valuable addition to corporate life, but not because I harbor any illusions about how successful they would be, but because—especially when it comes to business ethics—it is important to not let the good be the enemy of the better.
A chief ethics officer would likely face a variety of challenges, especially if they were in charge of a department that included no one but themselves. Even granted a C-suite position in the company and a full staff of employees to direct, this other sort of CEO would meet opposition from the chief financial officer when their recommendations were costly, or from the general counsel if they exposed the company to legal risk. For example, a chief ethics officer might correctly instruct the company that morality requires a public apology and admission of wrongdoing to begin making amends, but such an admission might open the firm to legal and financial liabilities.
Swisher’s column mentions one company that went so far as to interview candidates for a chief ethics officer position but got turned down by many of the academics considered, because they preferred to stay in their university roles, where they were “freer to ponder such issues.” For the academics who were likely interviewed for the position, this freedom comes from the protections of tenure and financial independence from the success or failure of any particular company, allowing them to judge more dispassionately and to speak more freely than they could if they had the role of giving unwelcome advice that could cost them their job and salary. Even if chief ethics officers were granted protections akin to tenure, we might rightly worry that the very fact they are employed by the company would cloud their moral judgment and leave them with an ongoing conflict of interest. Beyond such practical concerns, we might also think that the occupant of such a role faces an impossible task anyway, since, as one of Swisher’s unnamed sources put it, “[w]e haven’t even defined ethics yet.”
I am sure a chief ethics officer would face many of these challenges, because they are the kinds of obstacles already faced by the ethics and integrity officers that companies already employ. While more often tasked with matters of legal compliance than high-level moral judgments, companies already employ people with “ethics” or “integrity” in both their title and their mandate, even at the C-suite level. I know many of them in the Calgary business community, as part of a working group I organize called the “Integrity Network” that gathers business ethics professionals from the academic, industrial, and non-profit worlds to discuss current issues, pressing problems, and best practices. For the last seven years over more than 30 meetings, I have worked directly with people from different companies and institutions who write, teach, and enforce the ethical codes for their respective enterprises. While their goals are perhaps more straightforward than a philosophical enquiry into the right and the good, they face pressures in their jobs from other parts of their organizations and beyond—colleagues who have different priorities and who compete with them for attention and resources. Even when the ethical breaches are easily defined and the legal and reputational risks are potentially huge, current ethics and compliance departments face all the usual strains of any other corporate department operating today.
But just as these facts offer no reason to abandon current ethics and compliance roles in corporations, neither are they reason to be against the other sort of chief ethics officer that Swisher suggests. Such a position need not be pointless, powerless, or hopelessly corrupt. A high-level position tasked with morally evaluating the company’s structure and dealings at all levels would surely not make things perfect or be above other influences, but making someone’s salary depend on how well the company is doing morally might make the conversation around ethics at both the company and community level more prominent and more sophisticated. And this would make it worth doing, because it might succeed in making things a bit better.
This is what I mean when I say in business ethics we ought not let the good be the enemy of the better. Here, I am inspired by the pragmatist idea of meliorism, the notion that in both philosophy and other human endeavors we ought to focus on improving our condition and lived experience. I have been guided in my own work with businesses and business people by my own version of this idea: While we might not ever reach the entirely good outcome or right action, we might nevertheless succeed in our efforts to improve things, even if they are and remain well below what most moral theory would tell us is even “good.”
I am not the first to propose a meliorist approach in business ethics. Scott Stroud has already argued that William James’s specific “orientational meliorism … the concerted effort to change one’s mental attitude or orientation toward activity” can be applied to integrate the experiences and improve the lives of workers in business settings, and that business ethics research itself can be melioristic, aiming to “reconstruct or meliorate specific situations in work … contexts.”
My meliorist approach to business ethics is compatible with, but not reducible to, either James’s or Stroud’s, but is also pragmatist in the sense that it agrees that focus on what our moral theories tell us is precisely good can obstruct our efforts to improve our current actual situation. I don’t wish for my meliorism about business ethics to commit me fully to the idea that our focus should always be on the useful and achievable, instead of on the good and the true—only that we ought sometimes implement admittedly imperfect solutions that have promise to make even incremental improvements that still fall short of being fully good or right.
Confronting the day-to-day practices of corporate ethics after I spent years studying philosophical moral theory was a shock. Mixed motives and compromise solutions are everywhere; the realities of why things are done and what is possible are often quite far from the pure Kantian intentions or utility-maximizing outcomes I had studied in graduate school. For a while, I felt out of place and ill-equipped for these very different sorts of conversations. (Once I was contacted by a company that had been in the news for some ethical lapses that made the headlines and violations that involved law enforcement. They told me they had some “major ethical problems” with their employees which they hoped I could help with. What were those problems? People were taking staplers.)
But then I realized that I had an extraordinary opportunity: I was granted access to a business community that was willing to contact and listen to me. There was no way we were getting to what the theories I had studied would count as fully “good,” but I had an opportunity to guide the conversation to be more thoughtful and sophisticated, and thereby make practices a bit better. Inspired by the melioristic thought that my efforts should be devoted to making things better instead of getting things exactly right, I set about growing the Integrity Network to make the conversation around ethics in business more sophisticated and prominent, and I have succeeded, at least a little bit. As a result of our conversations, new teaching techniques have spread from academic to corporate worlds, successful ethical codes and strategies have spread across companies, and a general conversation about ethics both exists in the business community and goes beyond just legal compliance. The success of the group shows the appetite for a more sustained and sophisticated conversation around ethics in the business community. Since I began organizing it, the Integrity Network has gone from an informal group of around 11 people to an organization of more than 130 members from approximately 50 organizations, having just held its 31st meeting and having spawned a sister organization in Montreal.
We have not, of course, managed to “define ethics” in any of our meetings (some pragmatists might ask what use that project would be anyway), but we have started an ongoing conversation about ethical values and practices in businesses that has grown, stabilized, and made a difference in actual business practices. It has made the conversation about ethics in business in the business community more sophisticated and more prominent, even if things remain imperfect and constrained by a variety of forces and limitations.
Based on my experience working with ethics officers in the Integrity Network, I foresee substantial challenges for any company that would create the role of chief ethics officer and for anyone who would take it on. I would not expect any company who employs one to suddenly make all and only morally correct decisions or be magically immune to other corporate pressures. But these aren’t reasons not to have a chief ethics officer in your company; they’re just reasons why someone in such a role might not get things precisely right or be perfectly good. But that doesn’t mean they might not help make things better.
David G. Dick
David G. Dick (@DavidGDick) is an assistant professor of philosophy and fellow of the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business in the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
