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The moral arithmetic of everyday choices
Trade-offs can be challenging, but when morals get involved, they’re in a different league — yet we make them all the time (and reveal our true moral colours in the process)
Should companies be moral, and indeed can they be moral? Let’s not get stuck on semantics ( “it’s not the organizations, it’s the people that run it”): the choices people make in their role as a company manager reflect the culture and the values of the organization. John Paul Rollert, Chicago Booth Business School’s in-house ethicist, recently wrote a splendid essay that scrutinizes the claim that the purpose of a public company is to maximize profits, and in which he contemplates the alternative of “being merely profitable”. Companies inevitably make moral choices when decisions are made about how it operates, and sometimes a higher profit can be realized by compromising a moral principle. But is it just companies that are confronted with the moral dilemma between maximizing profit and being merely profitable, or do we, as individuals face similar quandaries?
The challenge of making moral choices
Just like companies, we make choices that determine our income, and that may have moral repercussions. I am willing to…
