Ethics

My computer has an alert voice that comes on whenever a command that does not conform to the operating system’s specifications is made, or a malfunction occurs. It begins with “It is NOT my fault” and continues to describe the machine’s condition that disallows the commanded function.

At school, when a child’s attention is called for talking while a lesson is being taught, the response one gets is invariably that of a finger pointing to the other person who would be blamed for starting the chat. This holds true, and more so, when trying to find out how a fight developed. The other person is always at fault. This phenomenon takes a slightly different form in the public domain, when an official is caught with a finger in the public till. Defenders are wont to explain the practice, as one that had always been tolerated in the past and the person who got the spotlight should not singularly be blamed. In our personal and social behavior, when held to account, Flip Wilson echoes our universal response: “The Devil made me do it!” As with my computer, we are used to accounting for behavior by disclaiming one’s culpability, and identifying who is at fault!

A decade ago, James Q. Wilson of UCLA wrote The Moral Sense. With media constantly filled with images of human depravity, one would assume that human nature is selfish, greedy and cruel. Wilson argued that though common wisdom claims humankind is devoid of innate moral character, humans do in fact behave morally. There is a sense of ought-ness‚ that is common to everyone. The Washington Post hailed his work as laying a foundation for a “science of the soul.”

Variations of the same theme has since occupied printed and broadcast media under titles such as Virtues and Vices, Values, Culture Wars, The Soul of Politics, The Politics of Meaning and others. Previously, this discourse would have been under the rubric of the investigations of Natural Law, the Divine Imperative, or the features of Historical Determinism. The business schools entered the conversation with a focus on business ethics. That moved the discussion to the level of indicative behavior.

What are ethical standards that the business community needs to abide by especially as commerce has become global and no longer captive to national politics and regional cultures? Greasing the skids of commerce from Singapore to Seoul used to mean 10-15 percent of one’s business budget, a practice perceived as corruptive in some sectors, enabling in another. In Brazil in the ‘70s, they had professionals called facilitators who were retained by business concerns, like lawyers, but whose function was to make sure that one‚s paper work sailed smoothly through government bureaucracy, and whose operational processes, by machine or muscle, are concluded efficiently and effectively.

The fall of the Marcos years in the Philippines had been attributed to the fact the cost of doing business reached 25 percent just to get out of government bureaucracy. The business community that propped Martial Law for a while, just got fed up, one was told. Returning from the United States in the ‘70s with trunk loads of books that had to clear customs, I encountered the all-too-powerful secretary who prepared one’s papers, she with the constantly open envelope drop-in drawer. The envelope determined where one’s paper work is positioned in the processing sequence.

Later, when trying to get tons of Vietnamese soy bean mill out of Manila Bay for a farmers’ cooperative, I failed to follow the informal protocol and paid dearly for discovering the filthy and expensive meaning of the word “demurrage.” At that same period, an auditing firm reported to USAID that when 15¢ of a capital improvement project dollar reaches the final beneficiary, this was considered a success. Of late, cooking the corporate books, or opening off-shore accounts to veil incomes and expenditures of publicly traded corporations, have come to fore in legal and ethical considerations.

Early this year, members of the Council of the Humanities across the nation gathered at Aspen, Colorado for a Summit to consider the faith-based values that informs images of “human nature” Across the world, the ascendancy of political theocracies and the resurgence of stringent religious fundamentalism have pushed the question of social values to the forefront of ethical discourse. The claim that religious values are creeping in fast in determining ethical behavior in a presumably diverse, multicultural, secular country like the United States is raising some concern in certain quarters, not because it is happening, but because the phenomenon remains unexamined.

The fact remains, however, that whether it is in the school playground, in public offices, or in the private sector, the question of what one “ought” do is a constant, practical issue. With tourism as a rapidly promoted business focus, what measures does one take to protect, preserve and properly develop the natural assets that serves as the industry’s basic capital? With the cultural diversity that now characterizes the private sector workforce, what civil and human rights need to be articulated and enacted, or, if already in place, be emphasized, to ensure that imported labor and managers are not exploited as simply expendable economic peons, but are treated as human beings with, after a certain period, equal and full access to the law?

Since the Persian Zarathustra divided reality as between the forces of good and evil, humankind had been left with a choice at every moment. Accountability of choices has always been an ongoing process and constant ingredient in the fabric of every human society. Articulating the ethical standards we keep, as well as those we violate, (and it should be clear by now that it is NOT the Devil’s fault), and making the discourse open, public, and dynamic, should perhaps now accompany the expression of our civic responsibility, in every workshop, seminar, forum, symposium and neighborhood chat. Let the discourse begin.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.