So the question comes up, who am I? Who are you?

You're not merely a collection of roles,

but you have identity as a human being.

You have a personal identity,

and your personal identity is not exactly like

your neighbor's or your cousin's or your sister's or your brother's.

Each one of us is slightly different.

We each have a subject-self.

I'm a subject-self Pat.

You're subject-self Jerry or Michael,

or whatever your name is.

And so, we're not merely a collection of my roles,

but I'm the subject of my roles and I can make moral judgments about them.

I can say, being a mother is too difficult when I have a child fighting with me,

or being a child is difficult when I have a nasty mother, and you can see that.

So when roles conflict,

I've got to make judgments,

and I do it all the time,

but it's I that makes the judgment,

the judgment about my roles.

So there's a limit to role morality.

One of the questions here in "What Price Safety?"

is, am I just following orders or just working here or just doing my assigned job?

You, when you have heard this excuse,

why do you do things that way?

Well, because I'm told to.

Well, you're just following orders and just exercising your role,

but you need to ask questions about that.

And in "What Price Safety?",

that's the question Stan has to ask.

Is he going to enforce the Motorola principles or that Nambuyan culture?

But he doesn't have to follow the rules of his role at Motorola.

He can choose, and that's what's important.

So this brings us then to another form of relativism, social group relativism.

So as managers, do we have obligations always to follow the norms of my social group?

Think about all your social groups you belong to.

So I have my friends, my religion,

I have the people I work with,

I have my family,

which ones of those rules should I follow?

And think about that.

Just because everybody does it,

does it make it right?

For example, this is a bad example, I'm sorry.

Slavery was an accepted practice,

the norm in many nations.

So we have to ask the question,

just because everybody does it, is it right?

And you know that from school when everybody sort of

got on a thing and did it, was it right?

Not always. And let me take a more broader example.

For centuries, slavery was the norm.

It was the right thing to do to have

different ethnic groups held in slavery, in captivity.

But is that right?

We would never say it was right,

even though it was a standard practice.

So there are two important distinctions we want to make here,

the distinction between an accepted practice,

which is common practice,

and what is considered acceptable or the right thing to do.

And we make those judgments all the time.

We make those judgments when we start judging our social groups.

So we appeal to more general standards,

not the same old ones.

So Stan, back at Motorola again,

has to decide whether

Motorola's principles of no physical abuse is an absolute principle,

a principle that should apply all across Motorola and all across other places,

or is it just very specific to Motorola?

So is it a general principle and always the right thing to do?

So how do we make moral judgments?

We do it all the time. You do that when you get up in the morning.

Is this the right thing, is this the wrong thing? What about my cousin?

What she did last night, I don't like.

We do it all the time. We make these judgments.

And so the question is, are any of these differences irresolvable?

Can there be any cross-cultural judgments?

Are there any universal values?

Like never physically assault someone,

is that a universal value or an absolute value that should never be ignored or disobeyed?

For many of you who belong to religious that have set up a series of

absolute values that should never be disobeyed, always obeyed.

But sometimes we ask questions about them,

about their extent and that's all right.

It doesn't mean we're against them,

it means that we're acting as we can as human beings to make moral judgments.

So the challenge of cultural relativism is there are

various customs and moral standards in different cultures.

We can describe these differences easily,

but even if we're describing them,

we want to have an ability to criticize other behaviors.

Now, of course, the famous example of ethics is Hitler.

Hitler was just a bad person.

You would all agree. He was a nasty person.

He created the Holocaust that killed six or seven million people.

And you want to say,

no, that was wrong.

That was wrong in Germany,

that was wrong anywhere,

and we want to be able to say that.

We want to be able to make some judgments about some things.

They're just wrong, period.

So how do we do that?

So what we do is we began to think about what principles cross over.

What principles can we apply?

So let's think back of last week we did the Bayer Crop Science case.

Bayer Crop Science is a German company, right?

But, if there is only relativism values,

it cannot judge whether child labor is wrong,

but Bayer decided child labor is wrong anywhere,

anytime, and maybe they're correct.

So, moral absolutism says that there are some values,

there are some principles that apply everywhere.

So Bayer Crop Science illustrates a form of moral absolutism,

that there are some actions which are

right and others are wrong no matter where they are.

Slavery is wrong.

Period. Hitler was a really, really bad guy.

Period. Bayer is saying child labor starting from 6 to 14 is wrong.

It's wrong in Germany,

it's wrong in India, it's wrong wherever,

even though it may be practiced and even though it may be a standard custom.

So that gives us to the question of values.

There are universal values,

but is there one set? Probably not.

Probably they're candidates for universal values.

And we often change our minds.

Think about the environment for a minute,

about which we're not unfortunately going to talk in this course.

Until recently, nobody thought much about the environment,

the natural environment, but today,

we think destroying the natural environment is wrong.

It's wrong in the United States,

it's wrong in China, it's wrong in Sri Lanka,

it's wrong all over the world.

So notice we've created a new candidate for

universal value and we appeal to that and we do that all.

Let me give an example of universal values.

This is called the United Nations Global Compact.

It is a voluntary code created to apply to

businesses and other organizations all around the world.

And their idea was to create a set of ten values that are universal.

So one is support human rights – that means respect every person as a human.

And don't be complicit in human.

Don't be complicit meaning don't let human rights abuses occur in your office,

in your operation, in your company.

And then uphold freedom of expression, freedom of speech.

Eliminate forced labor, slave labor.

Eliminate child labor, we've talked about that.

Eliminate discrimination in employment.

Be careful with the environment,

two principles of the environment

which would not have occurred if they'd written this 50 years ago.

And then work against corruption,

bribery in all forms.

Now they're taking those as universal values that

should apply to all businesses everywhere,

so you have to think whether they do or not.

At least we could reconfigure those as nots.

Don't be complicit in human rights abuses.

Respect people's rights.

Don't engage in forced labor.

Don't engage in child labor.

Don't participate in discrimination.

Don't contribute to environmental degradation.

Don't make the environment worse, for heaven's sakes.

It's already bad enough, right?

Avoid corruption. Notice those certain,

sort of negative nots,

but they seem to work across cultures.

So the aim here,

what is the aim?

The aim is some consensus,

not about everything, we would be boring if we all agreed about everything.

We would be boring if we didn't have different laws, different practices,

different traditions, different religions,

for heaven's sakes, different personal ethics.

I don't want to be exactly like you;

you don't want to be exactly like me.

That would be absolutely,

we'd be sound asleep in seconds.

But we do want to have consensus on some values,

consensus about moral minimums,

consensus about things that are never right no matter what,

and that helps us then make judgments across cultures,

like say Hitler was nasty,

he was nasty then,

he is still nasty,

he's going to be nasty in the 22nd or 23rd century.

It's those kinds of judgments that we want to be able to make across

cultures even though keeping cultural differences among us.

3-1.3b: The Issue(s) of Relativism Part. 2

Global Impact: Business Ethics

Meet the Instructors