ETHICS AND MODERN BUSINESS BY HENRY S. DENNISON BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 3 e XUbettfibe re tf Cambribsc 1932 COPYRIGHT, IQ33. BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL, RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BARBARA WEINSTOCK LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the University of California on the Weinstock FoundP tion. ETHICS AND MODERN BUSINESS i IN the course of its history business has had a lurid variety of standards of behavior and sometimes it has had none at all not even the rather elusive brand called honor among thieves Today, when business standards are certainly higher than they have some times been in the past, they are nevertheless confused and contradictory and the basis upon which they have been built has been given little if any thought. Hence, while the main emphasis of this talk must be upon the side of practical business rather than of the oretical ethics, it will be necessary at the be ginning, if we are to talk about business ethics at all, to come to some sort of under standing as to what basis of ethical judg ment we may use. 2 ETHICS AND In the first place we must make decision as to whether the basis for our judgments be tween right and wrong is to be authoritarian or personal is to be taken from an external source or worked out and adopted within our own minds. We may accept as external authority the New Testament, the laws of the land, or the traditional standards of the business group within which we find ourselves at work or we may have to rely upon our individual consciences. As for the New Testament, I think we can fairly say that while it gives us ideals upon which, and incentives with which to construct a basis for business ethics, it was written in an en vironment too far removed from the closely interwoven business world of modern times to give us anything much more specific. As for the laws of the land, partly on account of the practical difficulties of enforcement, we find that they have tended to follow behind the standards set by practice, and have at tempted to restrain the worst actors rather MODERN BUSINESS 3 than to set desirable standards for normal action. They are, therefore, too exclusively, though perhaps properly, expressions of merely minimal conduct, of conduct which is inexcusably bad, conduct far below the levels of the ethically desirable. And as to the traditions and standards set up in the business world itself, I have already said that they are vague, confused, and contradictory. It is the building up of a self-consistent body of ethical traditions in the business world and the possibilities of that building that we are, in fact, discussing here. We find ourselves, then, practically forced to look within for our basis of ethics, to ground it upon common intuition, or, in the strictest use of the word, upon commonsense. And since rules of ethics are primarily rules of behavior in society, we must establish them somehow upon what we may suppose to be good for that society as a whole, or, in the familiar phrase, upon the greatest good of the greatest number 4 ETHICS AND These phrases for the good of society and the greatest good of the greatest num ber are themselves, however, only a little less vague and general than the ideal state ment in the Bible to which they are so closely related, the statement given form in the Golden Rule and in the second great Commandment. They must be made more exact if they are finally to offer us much practical guidance...
