In three blogs leading into half term I want to suggest some ways of unpacking three applied issues at OCR A2. These issues are business ethics, the environment, and sexual ethics.

Let’s start by considering business ethics. There are a number of paradoxes with business ethics. One is that although nearly every business has some form of ethics code, not all businesses act ethically (and what is legal is of course not the same thing as what is ethical).

Part of the reason is that corporations (like schools) don’t just have value statements attached, they actually embody values. These values define how they treat their stakeholders (a key concept, meaning anyone who has a stake in the business be they shareholders, employees, customers or suppliers).Think of a school for example. It may profess to abhor bullying whilst at the same time doing nothing much to deter the bully.
This is why case studies are important. So consider Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fraud in 2003, which had an ethics code, but in its corporate culture or body language it embodied all sorts of unethical practice: deception, exploitation of the consumers of electricity in California who had to endure power cuts which cranked up the market price of energy, and the sacking of 10% of its workforce every year to encourage the others. Details are in the business ethics section.

A second paradox is this. Businessmen and women can be very nice people outside of business, and thoroughly unethical in it. They are like the fine Christian friend of mine who was very caring outside of a motor car but put him in it and a reckless abandonment of any modicum of safe driving ensued. We might call this the compartmentalisation of ethics.

Here the Milgram experiment is interesting. Recall how Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in 1962 aiming to show whether or not ordinary people are capable of extraordinarily immoral acts, such as administering lethal doses of electric shock to someone who had merely got a memory question wrong. Around two-thirds of people went to lethal levels just because someone in a white coat encouraged them with the words “it is essential the experiment continues”.

So a manager might argue “it is essential we make our figures this month”. Does essential here mean “do anything”? How much bending of what particular rule would I tolerate? For a great reworking of the Milgram experiment try the clip on YouTube under “Michael Portillo and Milgram”. As well as being funny, it raises profound issues about the compartmentalisation of ethics.

Click here for a hyperlink to a powerpoint on Milgram and Kant with the clip also embedded