Question of ethics: Is the common good in mind?

It is hot in Geneva. No, not Ahmedabad hot, but here one is not prepared mentally. Nor is the architecture designed to keep out the heat. The United Nations and its various organisations take up more than half a sprawling hill. Designed in the 1960s cement-concrete architecture, the buildings do not please the eye. The grounds somewhat make up for the lack.

We are gathered for the first conference on global ethics. Co-sponsored by a host of management schools and industry, I come to realise three hours through the first day that for the speakers and the organisers there are two pivotal points in the debate — corporate social responsibility and how management education needs to change to help people learn about corporate social responsibility in an uncertain world.

I find it amusing that the middle class and rich have suddenly, over the last year, post the financial crash, started talking about and being concerned with coping with uncertainty. It was the same earlier this year at the World Economic Conference in Davos.

Somehow the irony of their having neglected that 70 per cent of the  world that lives in constant uncertainty, does not strike home.
If they have lost several zeroes off their balance sheets, it is a crisis of unparalleled seriousness.

That the rest of the world lives wondering whether they will even earn a double-digit income that day has not been of particular concern. Rather like the middle class becoming repulsed with terror attacks after the Taj and the Oberoi were blown up.

The first key note, while chastising the propensity of corporations that are screwing the earth to pat themselves on the back because of some window dressing-like CSR, also spoke of corporations that were doing relevant CSR work.

Levers was signalled out for the work they do in South India, in training village women to be Shakti Ammas, and giving them a chance to market the Re1 packs of soap and shampoo thereby turning them into entrepreneurs. Does that wash away the guilt of turning hundreds of thousands of women into beings who only see their self worth in fairer skin? Does some good CSR equal ethical behaviour?

Several speakers spoke of this moment as a defining moment, with the possibility of re-looking at what was important to the corporation in actual terms, and then slipped into speaking of us only in terms of being consumers, producers or shareholders.

There is a dangerous tendency of seeing the corporation as the centre of life. We are the satellites to either purchase what they produce, or share in the wealth. We have no life beyond, and the health of the corporation is the vital lifeline. To what end, I asked? Well…after all profits and gathering more wealth, albeit ethically, was the central question of life, wasn’t it?

More speakers touched upon ideas of introducing CSR and ethics into management education, to give the students a broader framework, and whether or not schools were equipped to do so.

When there is a world conference on ethics, does it behove us to reduce ethics to integrity, or a corruption-free environment, or corporate social responsibility with an eye to the market? Surely the real question of ethics and ethical behaviour is much larger — that of behaving in a way that has the common good and the last person in mind at all times?

When will we finally get this and open up our vision to global realities, including the most urgent one of the way we are destroying our earth?