Imagine two black boxes, or systems, designed to earn you money. You can think of them as operating systems of sorts.
One black box is calibrated to maximize profit. It is very, very good at what it does, perhaps because it doesn’t concern itself with consequences of its actions. It is laser-focused on its narrow mission and will carry it on at any cost.
The other box is calibrated to attend to a whole series of sometimes contradictory considerations. As a result, it sometimes opts for reduced profit in the name of those other considerations.
Individuals in the first system are often told that they matter for who they are, but experience jars harshly with those declarations. Questioning such contradictions is frowned upon. Questioning the stated ends, even more so. This box is concerned with maximizing the output of the individuals it interacts with. And the fewer such individuals it has to concern itself with, the better, frankly.
The first system trains people to think and behave in a way that is aligned with its profit-maximizing mission. People associated with this box think it is normal to see others as instruments in pursuit of the desired outcome. Instrumentality is a feature, not a bug. In fact, this system works much better when the maximizing end is not only accepted, but passionately endorsed and promoted at all levels.
The second box trains people to openly face the sometimes irreconcilable contradictions they encounter; to deliberate together not just on the way to achieve some stated ends, but indeed on the matter of the desirability of those ends themselves: is what we are pursuing together good, for all of us and others beyond? This system, beyond the output that it generates, is concerned with the betterment and flourishing of the individuals it interacts with, not just as a random byproduct, but as a core feature.
Extollers of the first system will say that it produces more goods and services, more wealth, and therefore more wellbeing in aggregate. An abundance of selfishness, it is believed, will paradoxically result in more collective wellbeing.
Extollers of the second system say that selfishness is corrosive of trust, of relationships, and of society more broadly. They believe their system produces better values, better character, a stronger sense of community – better people and communities – and therefore, more general wellbeing.
The two models discussed here at a very high level are what you would call theories of the firm. Where you fall on them matters a lot, whether you are rank and file employee or a senior leader. It matters because the employee and the executive is also the citizen who brings those outlooks into the civic sphere. We spend such large parts of our lives at work, that the values and outlooks we are conditioned with ultimately shape the society we live in.
A society that is a byproduct of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, or a society aligned with Aristotle and MacIntyre?
Where do I personally fall on this? Anyone who has been fallowing me for any length of time will have guessed that I fall squarely on the side of human flourishing. A great read on this debate is world-renowned economist John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century. The book, writes the author, “is written in the spirit of Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which eudaimonia, most often today translated as flourishing, is the goal of existence. Eudemonia is the outcome of a life well lived, the result of not just of our worldly possessions but of relations with others.” (Kay, p. 346)
“The proper goal of corporate activity”, he continues, “is the flourishing of the multiple stakeholders of the corporation: employees, investors, suppliers and customers, the communities in which it operates and the corporation itself. For the corporation to flourish, it must contribute to the flourishing of the society in which it operates” (Kay, p. 347)
Now imagine that the black box in this article is no longer a metaphorical black box, but an actual expert system – an AI – running or helping to run the firm you work for. How would you want that black box calibrated and overseen? Would you be OK with an AI making final decisions that have an impact on you and your colleagues, and perhaps even your community?
Such questions are no longer theoretical. Business ethics, a term that many see as an oxymoron, are about to get hard-coded, quite literally, into the corporation of the 21st century. How this gets done, and by whom, is something we all have a stake in. It is in our collective interest to ensure that those decisions will be made not only by actual people, but by people endowed with certain virtues of character as well as a solid belief in the intrinsic value of human beings.
References:
Kay, John. The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong. Yale University Press, 2004.
