Ethical Relativism in Business Ethics

Business and Ethical Relativism There are certain cultural differences that create a special problem for managers. Managers of multinationals often find it hard to know what to do when they encounter moral standards that are different from the ones they personally hold and that are accepted in their home country. Nepotism and sexism, although condemned as morally wrong in the United States, for example, are accepted as a matter of course in some foreign business environments. The people of certain Arab societies hold that business bribery is morally acceptable, although Americans believe that it is immoral. What should a manager do when a government official in such a society asks for a bribe to perform some routine duty the official is supposed to provide for nothing? Or when the hiring department of a U.S. factory in Thailand seems to hire only relatives of those already working for the factory? Or when a group of South American managers refuse to accept a woman as a manager because they feel that women cannot be good managers? The fact that different cultures have different moral standards, leads many people to adopt the theory of ethical relativism. Ethical relativism is the theory that there are no ethical standards that are true absolutely, i.e., that the truth of all ethical standards depends on (is relative to) what a particular culture accepts. Consequently, there are no moral standards that should be used to evaluate the ethics of everyone’s actions no matter what culture they belong to. Instead, the ethical relativist holds that a person’s action is morally right if it accords with the ethical standards accepted in that person’s culture, and is wrong if it violates the ethical standards accepted in that person’s culture. To put it another way: Ethical relativism is the view that, because different societies have different moral beliefs, there is no rational way of determining whether a person’s action is morally right (or wrong) other than by asking whether the members of the person’s own society believe it is morally right (or wrong). The ethical relativist will say, for example, that it is wrong for a U.S. manager to engage in nepotism in the United States because everyone there believes that it is wrong, but it is not wrong for a person in Thailand, for example, to engage in nepotism there because people there do not see it as wrong. The ethical relativist would advise the manager of a multinational who works in a society whose moral standards are different from her own, that she should follow the moral standards prevalent in the society in which she works. Since moral standards differ and since there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, the best a manager can do is follow the old adage, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” But is ethical relativism a reasonable view to hold? The ethical relativist is clearly right to claim that there are numerous practices that are judged immoral by people in one society that people of other societies believe are morally acceptable. Some examples of practices societies disagree about include polygamy, abortion, infanticide, slavery, bribery, homosexuality, racial and sexual discrimination, genocide, patricide, and the torture of animals. Yet critics of ethical relativism have pointed out that it does not follow that there are no moral standards which are binding on people everywhere. Although societies disagree about some moral standards, they agree on others. Critics of ethical relativism have argued, in fact, that there are certain ethical or moral relativism The theory that there are no ethical standards that are absolutely true and that apply or should be applied to the companies and people of all societies. Quick Review 1.12 Objections to Ethical Relativism • Some moral standards are found in all societies. • Moral differences do not logically imply relativism. • Relativism has incoherent consequences. • Relativism privileges whatever moral standards are widely accepted in a society. basic moral standards that the members of any society must accept if that society is to survive and if its members are to interact with each other effectively.57 Thus, all societies have norms against injuring or killing their own members, norms about using language truthfully among themselves, and norms against taking the goods that belong to other members of society. Moreover, anthropologists have found numerous moral values and norms that are universal, i.e., that all known human groups recognize. Among these universals are: the appropriateness of reciprocity, the appropriateness of cooperation, the prohibition of incest, the prohibition of rape, empathy, friendship, the difference between right and wrong, fairness, the requirement to compensate injuries, the goodness of courage, the requirement that parents care for their children, restrictions on some forms of violence, the prohibition of murder, the prohibition against breaking promises, the appropriateness of feeling guilt and shame for wrongdoing, the appropriateness of having pride for one’s achievements, and the requirement that actions one could control should be treated differently from those one could not control. In addition, many apparent moral differences among societies turn out on closer examination to mask deeper underlying similarities. For example, anthropologists tell us that in some Alaskan Inuit societies it was morally acceptable for families to abandon their aged to die outdoors during times of hardship, whereas other Indian societies have felt that abandoning someone to freeze to death outdoors is akin to murder. Yet on closer examination, it can turn out that underlying this difference between Inuit society and other Indian societies is the same moral standard: the moral duty of ensuring the long-term survival of one’s family. In their harsh environment, Inuit people may have had no way of ensuring the family’s survival when food supplies ran short other than by abandoning their aged. Other Indian societies have believed that family survival required protecting the elders who carried within them the knowledge and experience the family needed. The differences between Inuits and other Indians is not due to a real difference in values, but is due, rather, to the fact that one and the same value can lead to two different moral judgments when the value is applied in two very different situations. Other critics of ethical relativism have pointed out that when people have different moral beliefs about some issue, it does not follow that there is no absolute truth about that issue nor that all beliefs about it are equally acceptable. All that follows when two people or two groups have different beliefs is that at least one of them is wrong. For example, the late philosopher James Rachels points out: The fact that different societies have different moral codes proves nothing. There is also disagreement from society to society about scientific matters: in some cultures it is believed that the earth is flat, and that disease is caused by evil spirits. We do not on that account conclude that there is no truth in geography or in medicine. Instead, we conclude that in some cultures people are better informed than in others. Similarly, disagreement in ethics might signal nothing more than that some people are less enlightened than others. At the very least, the fact of disagreement does not, by itself, entail that truth does not exist. Why should we assume that, if ethical truth exists, everyone must know it?58 Perhaps the most important criticism of ethical relativism is that it has incoherent consequences. If ethical relativism were true, opponents claim, then it would not make sense to criticize the practices of other societies so long as their practices conformed to their own standards. For example, we could not say that child slavery, as practiced in many societies around the world, is wrong, nor that the discrimination Quick Review 1.13 Integrative Social Contracts Theory Indicates that • Hypernorms should apply to people in all societies • Microsocial norms apply only in specific societies and differ from one society to another. practiced in the society of apartheid South Africa in the twentieth century was unjust, nor that it was immoral for the Germans to kill Jews in the Nazi society of the 1930s. For, in each of these societies, people were just doing what the standards of their society said they should do.59 Critics of ethical relativism also argue that if ethical relativism were correct, then it would make no sense—in fact it would be morally wrong—to criticize any of the moral standards or practices accepted by our own society. If our society accepts that a certain practice—such as slavery—is morally right, then as members of this society, we too must accept that practice as morally right, at least according to ethical relativism. For example, ethical relativism implies that it was wrong for Southern abolitionists to object to slavery since slavery was accepted in Southern society before the Civil War. According to critics, then, the theory of ethical relativism implies that whatever the majority in one’s society believes about morality is automatically correct and so their beliefs cannot be criticized. The fundamental problem with ethical relativism, critics allege, is that it holds that the moral standards of a society are the only standards by which actions in that society can be judged. The theory gives the moral standards of each society a privileged place that is above all criticism by members of that society or by anyone else: For the relativist, a society’s moral standards cannot be mistaken. Clearly, opponents say, this implication of ethical relativism indicates that the theory is wrong.; we all know that at least some of the moral standards of our own society as well as those of other societies may be mistaken. The theory of ethical relativism, then, does not seem to be correct. But even if the theory of ethical relativism is ultimately rejected, this does not mean that it has nothing to teach us. The ethical relativist correctly reminds us that different societies have different moral beliefs and that we should not simply dismiss the moral beliefs of other cultures when they do not match our own. However, ethical relativism seems to be mistaken in its basic claim that all moral beliefs are equally acceptable and that the only criteria of right and wrong are the moral standards prevalent in a given society. And if ethical relativism is wrong, then there are some moral standards that should be applied to the behaviors of everyone, regardless of what society they live in. In the next chapter, we will explore what kind of standards these might be. The upshot of our discussion is that there are two kinds of moral standards: those that differ from one society to another, and those that should be applied in all societies. One way of thinking about these two kinds of moral standards is to adopt a framework called “Integrative Social Contracts Theory” or ISCT for short.60 According to the ISCT framework, there are two kinds of moral standards: (1) Hypernorms, which consist of those moral standards that should be applied to people in all societies, and (2) Microsocial norms, which are those norms that differ from one community to another and that should be applied to people only if their community accepts those particular norms. ISCT holds that it is useful to think of hypernorms as part of a social contract that all people have accepted, and to think of microsocial norms as part of a social contract that the members of a specific community have accepted. Examples of some hypernorms might be human rights principles and principles of justice that apply to all people in all communities. On the other hand, one example of a microsocial norm is the norm that allows a father and a son to take on a common wife, a moral norm that is accepted in Tibet but rejected in all other communities. Another microsocial norm is the norm that when traveling a married woman must be accompanied by her husband or a male relative, a norm that is accepted in Saudi Arabia and several other Arab countries but not in the United States nor in Europe. ISCT claims that hypernorms take priority over microsocial norms. That is, microsocial norms must not contradict hypernorms. If a microsocial norm violates a hypernorm, then it is unethical and should be rejected. Nevertheless, ISCT assumes that hypernorms must allow every community to have some “moral free space.” Moral free space consists of the range of norms that a community is free to accept because they do not violate any hypernorms. The people of a community, according to ISCT, ought to follow the microsocial norms that are accepted in their community. However, the members of a community must be free to leave their community if they strongly disagree with their community’s microsocial norms. Moreover, according to ISCT, when a manager is operating in a foreign community, the manager should follow the microsocial norms of that community, so long as they do not violate any hypernorms. If the microsocial norms of a community violate a hypernorm, then the manager should not follow that microsocial norm. Many critics reject the ISCT view that hypernorms should be thought of as part of a social contract that all reasonable people have accepted, while relativists reject the very idea that there are any absolute universal hypernorms. Nevertheless, the distinction between hypernorms and microsocial norms is a useful one. Assuming that there are hypernorms, the distinction provides a useful way to think about the interplay between absolute moral norms that should apply to all people everywhere, and local norms that differ from one society to another. It provides a useful framework for understanding how to deal with moral differences. We have argued that there are absolute moral norms that should apply everywhere; what these might be is a question that we will discuss in the next chapter.