The Moral Life: "What's In It For Me"
Thomas I. White
 

Want more detail about the ideas of Socrates on this topic?

The most frequently told joke about business in this country is probably that"business ethics" is an oxymoron. Few people who use this one-liner actually mean to say that business is a fundamentally unethical enterprise. But the remark does reveal major tensions between business and the moral life--tensions that are as disturbing as they are important.   There is one way, after all, that "business" and "ethics" do not necessarily go together. Succeeding in business is largely about advancing our own private interests--aggressively competing against other people, beating them out for the same prize, and having unlimited ambition for money, position,and power. The moral life, by contrast, focuses on our duties to others--not to hurt anyone (deliberately or accidentally), to place other people’s interests ahead of our own when it’s called for, and always to treat others with the dignity and respect they deserve. Yet being scrupulously honest and caring in our business dealings with others can sometimes cost us sales,deals, money, and promotions. Refusing to go along with other people’s unethical behavior can even cost us our jobs. When taken too far in business, even healthy self-interest, competitiveness, and ambition can go turn into selfishness, aggression, and greed--traits that are clearly at odds withthe moral life.

 

It seems, then, that taking ethics seriously in business extracts a price and may make success more difficult to come by. But if this is true, why should any of us make the effort to do what’s right? In particular, what would we say to someone who asks, "Why should I be ethical? What’s in it for me?"

The demand for such a blatantly self-interested defense of ethics might seem surprising, even unsettling. As we noted above, the moral life traditionally focuses on our duties towards other people not on how we can get something for ourselves. But this is a perfectly reasonable request. After all, there’s little question why someone might be drawn to master the arts of deceit: money, sex, the admiration of others, the power to control other people, freedom to do whatever you like. Moreover, every day we cooperate in making this society one in which we as a people say: "What’s ‘good’ is what’s 'good for me.’" If the moral life cannot provide as strong a case for itself as vice, we have to be honest enough to admit that and reassess what ethics is all about. [Perhaps, as some thinkers have suggested, conventional morality is just the product of weak people making virtues out of their failings.]

But what would we say? How do we give a selfish defense for the moral life?

The best self-interested argument for the moral life is to be found in theclaim that there is a direct relationship between ethical behavior andthe strength and health of the human personality. In short, in some critical ways, unethical behavior weakens the personality.

The idea that there is a direct relationship between ethics and the human personality actually has a long history in ethics. It was first advanced by Socrates,who claimed in the dusty streets of ancient Athens that "vice harms the doer." Even if we know we can get away with doing something wrong, claims Socrates, even if no one ever discovers what we’re up to, our vice harms us more than it hurts any of our victims.

Socrates’ idea may seem rather odd. But Socrates was so convinced of its truth tha the not only lived by it, he died by it. Socrates spent his days in Athens exhorting his fellow citizens to a life of virtue, but at the end of his life he was falsely accused of two capital offenses: impiety and corrupting the young. Tragically, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to die. While he was in jail awaiting execution, however, his friends tried to persuade him to escape. He refused because he became convinced that escaping would be morally wrong. And even though Socrates was faced with dying for a crime he didn’t commit, he chose death because he was convinced he would be harmed more by intentionally doing something wrong than he would by suffering an unjust death.

What could Socrates mean? How does vice harm us that badly that it could lead to Socrates’ decision?

The most specific account of what Socrates has in mind is found in an encounter between the philosopher and the character Callicles in the Platonic dialogue,the Gorgias. Callicles is portrayed by Plato as a very talented and ambitious young Athenian who has decided that a conscience only gets in the way of success. He thinks that Socrates’ idea that "vice harms the doer" is laughable. He sees no evidence of being harmed by his selfish and aggressive pursuit of money, power, and pleasure--quite the contrary. He sees himself as a truly strong individual, superior to the people who obey the rules of traditional morality. They do so, according to Callicles, only out of weakness and an inability to best other people in life’s great competition. How does Socrates respond to the challenge?

Socrates has no trouble pointing out how Callicles’ unethical behavior has hurt the young Athenian. Socrates points out two particular dimensions. First, by Callicles’ own admission, his goal in life is to let his desires andambitions grow without bounds. The truly strong person, in Callicles’ mind, will find ways to satisfy them. To Socrates, however, Callicles is describing a scenario in which he will slowly but inevitably lose control of his own life as he is enslaved by his growing--and ultimately insatiable--desires. Second, Socrates observes that the young man will say anything he has to in order to get what he wants. But Socrates is claiming more than that Callicles is a clever liar. The philosopher’s point is that the power of Callicles’ unbridled hunger is so great that even the young man’s mind has been brought into the service of his desires.

Now to Socrates--and, I hope, to us as well--there is little question that Callicles’ personality has been damaged. Indeed, Socrates describes two characteristics of severe addiction: the inability ever to be satisfied,and the use of lies and rationalizations in order to get the object of our addiction. Callicles’ vice has harmed him because he is losing control over his own life. Callicles’ boundless desires now control him, and they have even taken his mind captive.

Whatis especially interesting about Socrates’ picture of how vice harms thedoer, however, is that the philosopher might just as well be talking about any number of people who were arrested for unethical behavior in business over the last two decades. What is striking about such cases is not how shockingly unethical the behavior was, but what led to a wrongdoer’s undoing. Invariably, these were very bright, talented, capable people who were brought down by carelessness, poor judgment, overreaching, and going to the wellone time too often.

In particular, these individuals failed to assess accurately the risks theyfaced. Statistically, the more often you do something illegal, the more likely it is that you’ll be caught. Hence, the more careful you should be. Yet in these cases, the people involved apparently came to seethemselves either as bulletproof or as involved in something so inconsequential that being caught barely crossed their minds. So they got less careful.(The lesson of these cases is almost as though serious wrongdoing makesyou stupid!)

These very bright people got caught because they did something foolish--theycouldn’t restrain themselves when they should have, and they weren’t careful enough. That is, they behaved exactly in line with what Socrateslays at Callicles’ feet. Their appetites were out of control. And their minds fell into the service of their desires. These men and women couldn’t even do basic risk assessment. They stopped seeing the world the way it really is. And as harm goes, this is all very serious.

In fact, we even have agreement with Socrates from a twentieth-century businessman, Conrad Hilton. Hilton ends his autobiography, Be My Guest, withsome recommendations for the "art of living" and reflections about the negative affect of dishonesty. In his exhortation that we should "be honest," Hilton writes,

Once you start it, there’s no place that deception can stop--and of course it has to start with self-deception, even if it’s only the self-deceptionof believing that we can get away with it. True, sometimes we are not "discovered." But all of modern psychology and psychiatry is based on the belief that our self-deceptions drive things into our subconscious where they make all kinds of trouble. The self-deception that Hilton points to is an example of how Socrates thinks that the mind is harmed by vice. A pattern of seriously unethical behavior increases the extent to which we distort reality. If we get into the habit of lying, manipulating, ignoring the impact of our actions on others, and ignoring our duty to other people, we will start altering the way we look at theworld. We will minimize the significance of what’s at stake, or we’ll rationalizethe behavior. And the more we distort reality, the more likely it is that we’ll continue to act unethically, and the less likely it is that we will be happy.

Takethe example of lying, for instance. Everybody’s first lie is difficult to tell. But if we get away with it, we see that there are benefits tolying, and it subsequently gets easier. If we lie often enough, we start changing the way we see things. We become convinced that lying doesn’t really hurt anyone. We wonder why we ever thought that there was something wrong with lying in the first place. We see ourselves as having gained an important skill in life (not as having lost an important allegianceto truth and honesty). We naturally assume that other people lie, and we act accordingly. We may even start believing our own lies--more than the people around us do. And all of this will surely make it harder for usto be happy. Our relationships will be founded on distrust, we will end up surrounded only by predators like ourselves, and our distortions will only increase the likelihood that we will be uncovered as the cads that we really are.

So in answer to someone who asks, "What’s in it for me to be ethical?," we can reply, "Quite a bit--a more accurate perception of the world around you, greater control over your behavior, a stronger personality, and greater likelihood of being happy in life."

Being careful not to hurt other people, accepting full responsibility for whatwe do, helping others, and always treating them with the dignity they deserve may indeed in business, as in life, cost us money, power, and the like.But that’s considerably cheaper than costing us our hearts, souls, and happiness.

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