Do you work for a company or public body that does things that make you feel uncomfortable? Perhaps you have noticed poor quality service or faulty goods. Sometimes sharp business practices are used and corners are cut. Yet business ethics is not always a clear-cut matter. An action that one person may consider perfectly reasonable might be seen as wrong by another. Is that recently announced executive pay bonus okay or too high? Does the current advertising campaign add up to honest or dishonest selling? Are suppliers paid after a fair period of time?
Ambrose Bierce once wrote:
“Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility”
In line with this attitude, you might say that a company has a life of its own but no soul; and that this means that all of its employees and shareholders can hide behind the corporate mask that has no ethical culpability.
Yet is it fair to tarnish all organisations with the same brush? Are there not any corporate bodies which do try to embody their ethical codes of practice? The trouble is, it is not always easy to know whether the organisation that employs us is acting within the spirit of its guidelines
The spiritual principle of usefulness
Emanuel Swedenborg offers us a spiritual principle to lead us in our personal lives. We might want to consider whether this can also be applied to an organisation’s conduct. He wrote that one should be useful to oneself, one’s family and one’s community.
Being of use to oneself would mean looking after one’s own physical, emotional, and other personal needs. How can one be of use to one’s family and one’s community unless these are met?
Being useful to one’s family for example is earning money to pay for what the children need despite one’s unease with how a business is conducted.
Being useful to one’s community may involve blowing the whistle and alerting outside authority to illegal or other serious misdemeanours despite the resulting risk of the sack.
The challenge of getting the right balance
What’s right for you may not be right for your family and, even if it were right for the family, it might not be right for the environment we all live in.
How to balance these three kinds of usefulness may be a difficult matter of careful judgement. There are few cut-and-dried answers here.
Careful observation and reflection is required. Is the business making money above the customers’ welfare or through what the customers want? Is it right to exploit what the market will bear in order to charge high prices and pay low wages? Where does the balance lie between the needs of shareholders, employees, and customers?
We would say that wanting more money for its own sake by any of these groups should not be the deciding factor.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Jesus Christ)
Copyright 2024 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of Heart, Head & Hands Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems
If you like this, you may also like:
Spiritual questions & answers about ethics