An Interfaith Declaration of Business (Ethics)

Released in 1994, “An Interfaith Declaration: A Code of Ethics on International Business for Christians, Muslims, and Jews” is comprised of two parts: principles and guidelines. The four principles (justice, mutual respect/love, stewardship and honesty) are described predominantly in religious terms, devoid of any connection to business. In contrast, the guidelines invoke the principles in their ethical sense, devoid of any religious connotation. The disconnect in applying religious ethics to business is not merely in books; the heavenly and earthly cities are as though separated by a great ocean of time.

Are these religions applicable to business?    

To be sure, the text refers to business in discussing the ethical principles of love, stewardship and honesty, however briefly. Love in the business world is to extend out from corporate boundaries to  stakeholders. Stewardship applies to a business’s use of resources such that ownership itself is qualified beyond the reach of regulation. Lastly, honesty includes the use of “true scales.” The honest are said to get a religious reward (i.e., resurrection), presumably to compensate for any monetary loss in being honest in business.

Turning to the guidelines for business, they are portrayed predominately in the text mostly as a defense of corporate capitalism. Strangely, the reference to the principles is devoid of any religious association. The following guideline is typical: “The efficient use of scarce resources will be ensured by the business” (A.7). Another guideline adds a reference to an ethical principle: “Competition between businesses has generally been shown to be the most effective way to ensure that resources are not wasted, costs are minimized and prices fair” (A.2). To be sure, fairness is indeed an ethical principle, which John Rawls applies in his Theory of Justice. However, fairness is not among the religious ethical principles. Furthermore, no religious content is referenced in the guideline, as well as still another: “The basis of the relationship with the principal stakeholders shall be honesty and fairness, by which is meant integrity” (B.3). The reader is left to ponder what integrity looks like in terms of the three Abrahamic religions.

A major problem in relating monotheism and business ethics comes down to the enigma that God’s omnipotence cannot be limited by a human ethical system, and yet divine decrees that violate secular ethical principles are untenable and thus typically considered to be invalid. For example, killing people who refuse to convert because God says rankles the modern conscience into seemingly rebelling against the Ultimate. The question naturally flairs up regarding whether God really decrees the sordid practice. Looking out of a smoked window in this earthly realm, we mortals tend to conceptualize or sense God as extending beyond the limits of human perception and cognition. This means that we cannot rely on any firm answer in justifying a divine decree above a social ethic. 

For example, insisting that employees keep the Sabbath, whether on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, may not be fair to the workers who do not recognize the validity of the Ten Commandments. Given the limitations discussed above that preempt religious intuition, belief, and experience from being recognized as factual knowledge, an employer cannot justifiably treat the revelation as though a fact that an objecting employee has no cause to ignore. The question of the revelation's divine validity is ultimately at stake here, and no answer can possibly settle the matter in dispute.

In conclusion, it follows that throwing monotheism into the mix of business and ethics cannot reduce to a simplistic list of determinate guidelines. Getting beyond the “oil and water” of the sacred and profane turns out to be a whale of a challenge to religious business practitioners. In Christian terms, the problem can be put in terms of whether the "fully human and fully divine" Christology devoid of blending is a sufficient basis to cross the ocean of time between Sunday and Monday.  

Source:

An Interfaith Declaration: A Code of Ethics on International Business for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Related paper: "Religion in Strategic Leadership: A Positivistic, Normative/Theological and Strategic Analysis," Journal of Business Ethics (2005) 57: 221-239.

Related book: God's Gold  The text goes through the history of Christian thought on how greed is related to wealth and profit-seeking, and proffers an explanation for why the historical shift was from anti-wealth to a pro-wealth dominant stance. 

Corporate Social Responsibility Is Not Altruistic: The Case of Amazon Prime

In a doctoral seminar on corporate social responsibility (CSR), the professor turned to me, perhaps because by then I was also taking courses in the religious studies department, and asked, “What is enlightened self-interest?” In my answer, I argued that such self-interest is distinctly oriented to the long-term, rather than, for example, immediate profits. Alternatively, I could have stressed the ethical connotation of the word, enlightened, but the self-interest component would seem to invalidate an ethical basis. In line with the notion of love as caritas, which is human love (eros) sublimated up directed to God, as distinct from agape, which excludes lower, self-interest inclusive, love, doing good can go along with long-term self-interest. In other words, doing good has value because good is done even if self-interest is salient in the motive. In regard to CSR, the self-interest that coincides is long-term-oriented. Amazon, for instance, giving the poor (i.e., Medicaid recipients) 50 percent off on the monthly charge for Amazon Prime is in line with gaining full-paying customers eventually, for it usually takes a while for poor people to move up the economic ladder. 

In 2017, Amazon made discounts of an almost 50 percent discount on Prime memberships available to people receiving “food stamps.” The following year, the company expanded its reach to customers by giving the discount to people with Medicaid medical insurance. The first step to increasing a standard customer base is to reach out to people who would not become customers without an additional incentive. Amazon’s management wanted “to gain more market share among low-income consumers and those without access to traditional banking and credit.”[1] The company was betting that a significant enough percentage of the discount-taking customers would eventually have enough wealth to access banking that they could pay the full monthly price. I suspect that a manager “ran the numbers” based on an estimate of that percentage and set the discount accordingly as a break-even point.

That Amazon’s management was likely geared to the company’s long-term financial interest in terms of market-share generally and turning impoverished people into full-paying customers more specifically does not mean that societal good was not enhanced, for the purchase power of the poorest of the poor could be expanded. The good, in other words, lay in the added utility, and this is a significant ethical good, for the poorest, I can attest, suffer unrelentingly with the hardships of poverty. Not even hard work can result in appreciable change in terms of income and wealth. The poor benefitting from Amazon’s discount justifiably don’t care whether the company’s management extended the offer in order to gain market-share.

A company’s enlightened self-interest in CSR does not mean that good is not done. Its “certainly the case that we’re hoping to create some lifetime Prime members here,” a program manager at Amazon said when the expansion to Medicaid occurred in 2018.[2] The company was positioning itself to go head to head with Walmart. Amazon was clear that it was “making this move for business reasons, not for altruism, but”—and here is my point—“that doesn’t mean it won’t help people,” said Avi Greengart, an industry analyst at a marketing research firm.[3] Altruism may actually be quite rare, or even non-existent in its pure form, in human nature even as it appreciates the good. 
Caritas is much more realistic than agape. It is for this reason that the latter is designated as divine love—the self-emptying (hence selfless) love that a deity not having a human nature has. In Christianity, Augustine and Calvin emphasize in their respective writings that God is love. These theologians differed, however, on whether it is too much to ask humans to have and display selfless (agape) love rather than merely self-interest-infused love aimed high to God (caritas); Calvin was more idealistic in this respect. 
Doing good in the sense of improving the lot of other people applies to not only the Christian notion of neighbor-love, that is, caritas seu benevolentia universalis, but also simply wanting to make a positive impact society. Self-interest is more salient in the latter--that is, doing good ethically in the absence of love, but this does not mean that good is not done, even if as a byproduct. This brings us back to corporate social responsibility, realistically construed.

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1, Elizabeth Weise, “Medicaid Recipients Can Get Discount on Amazon Prime,” USA Today, March 8, 2018.

2,  Ibid.

3, Ibid.

The Founder of Theranos: A Flawed Charismatic Vision and Leader

“Theranos rose quickly from being a college dropout’s idea to revolutionize the blood analysis industry to a hot tech bet that accrued $700 million in funding and many famous names for its board.”[1] Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, was stripped of her position at the company in 2018 after the SEC discovered her deep involvement with the fraud at the company. Her “smarts, fierce determination and Steve Jobs-inspired look . . . were critical” to her being able to perpetuate the lie that the company had a device that could do blood tests with just a scant amount of blood, obviating the unpleasant experience of having blood drawn by needle.[2] Although Jack Welsh, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs accomplished enough to warrant their fame, I submit that companies are too prone to create “champions”—even strangely calling them “rock stars.” In other words, even though charismatic vision is of value to a business, neither such a leader nor his or her vision itself should be overplayed. Business, I submit, has a marked tendency to do just that, and often with impunity.

The full essay is at "Fraudulent Charismatic Vision at Theranos."

On leadership vision, see Skip Worden, The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation

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[1] Marco della Cava, “Behind the Scenes of Theranos’ Dramatic Rise, Fall,” USA Today, March 16, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

Facebook: A Distrustful Company Projecting Distrust

Cambridge Analytica, political data firm founded by Stephen Bannon and Robert Mercer, and with ties to U.S. President Trump’s 2016 campaign, “was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.”[1] The firm had purchased the data from a developer (a psychology professor at Cambridge University in the E.U.) who had developed a personality test that Facebook users could take, and whose purpose was supposedly academic. The developer violated Facebook’s policy on how user data could be used by third parties. The data firm “used the Facebook data to develop methods that [the firm] claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior.”[2] In other words, Cambridge Analytica used the purchased data to manipulate users to vote for Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 by sending pro-Trump messages. Although Facebook had not known of the sale of the data to Cambridge Analytica at the time, the social network, upon learning Cambridge Analytica’s political use of the data in 2015, failed to notify its users whose data had been compromised. Although 270,000 Facebook users took the developer’s personality test, “the data of some 50 million  users . . . was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.”[3] It bears noting here that those of the 50 million users who had not taken the personality test should definitely have been informed. At the very least, Facebook’s management could not be trusted to not only  keep users informed, but also protect users in the first place by adequately enforcing the third-party-use policy. So it is ironic that Facebook’s untrustworthy management could be unduly distrustful of ordinary users.

The psychological-political mixture in Cambridge Analytica’s use of the data is downright creepy. Tapping into a psychology professor’s methodology for inferring personality from data on a social network platform so to be able to send politically manipulative advertising to certain Facebook users  is highly invasive, even for the users who voluntarily took the professor’s personality test online. Regardless of party affiliation, a reaction of disapprobation to such an over-reach could be expected; hence the operation was stealth—which is why Facebook’s management erred so in failing to inform the 50 million users. Facebook’s stock deserved to fall when the story finally did break in March, 2018.

It is odd that Facebook’s management even permitted the developer, the psychology professor who went on to sell the data to Cambridge Analytica, to obtain the data in the first place to develop personality constructs for academic purposes. It is also odd that Facebook’s management had been so naïve concerning a political data firm, and yet so demanding of individual users who displayed no cause for suspicion. Facebook suspended an account I set up because I had sent a link to one of my academic articles to some scholars I knew. I deleted the account. A few years later, I tried again. That time, Facebook demanded that I upload a clear facial picture of myself so I could be identified. Apparently my phone number and email address were not sufficient, even though I had not yet even used the account and thus could not have violated any of the company’s use-policies. I deleted that account rather than supply a picture of myself because I was concerned how the facial recognition software would be used, especially when combined with other basic information I had included in the profile. It turns out I had reason to be concerned, for even if my personality had not been construed and I had not been subject to political manipulation psychologically, the fact that Facebook let a political firm in the door means that other harvesting could have been going on. Furthermore, even if Facebook discovered other extractions, I could not trust that the company would have informed me.

It is telling, in short, that a company so distrustful demanded that I upload a picture of my face so I could be identified—as if I were distrustful. I suspect that the managers and their employees were projecting their own distrustfulness onto innocent users, while giving firms like Cambridge Analytica a free hand. In other words, the folks at Facebook were very bad at determining who is trustworthy. The lesson here is that Facebook was not worthy of its users’ trust, and yet strangely the users did not bolt en mass. It could be that people in modern society had become so used to being distrusted by people working in organizations and to interacting with distrustful companies that the Facebook revelation was a mere blimp on the radar screen.

The philosopher Kant reasoned that promise-making is only valid in a context in which promises tend to be kept; otherwise, promises would simply be dismissed as worthless dribble. If large companies only keep their promises when doing so is convenient to them, such a context could recalibrate just how much worth promise-making justifiably deserves. If so, the business world itself could contribute to a society in which distrust rather than trust is the norm. When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I experienced such a society. I could feel not only the angst in the air, but also the passive aggression in the distrust itself. Besides the police-state being “beyond the pale” even on the local university’s campus, the guarded watchfulness that was (and surely is still) practiced between strangers on the city streets (as well as between bus drivers and riders) included an inherent aggressiveness. Likewise, Facebook’s refusal to notify users of the “harvesting” and Facebook’s demand that I furnish a photo of my face involved passive aggression—which is inherent in unjustified disrespect. Are companies like Facebook unwittingly turning modern society into Tucsons? If so, the link between distrust and aggression should be made transparent so people can at least be aware of the change.

For a business ethics critique of Facebook, see Taking the Face off Facebook

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1. Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Role In Data Misuse Sets Off Storm,” The New York Times, March 19, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. “Cambridge Analytica: Facebook ‘being investigated by FTC,’” BBC News ( accessed March 20, 2018).