In the business world, it’s common to hear about people seeing opportunities. Here’s a few examples I’ve stumbled across recently:

‘Where…the company’s previous owner saw obstacles, I saw an opportunity to transform an entire industry’

‘They saw an opportunity to harness new technology …to provide a fresh, very effective solution to an existing problem.’

‘You could go back to the beginning of E-Bay, where they saw an opportunity to connect people through launching a virtual flea market.’

Recognising opportunities like these is obviously crucial to business success. But is it right to say that these business people saw the opportunities? It’s tempting to think this is just meant figuratively. You don’t literally see opportunities like you see the hand in front of you face. Rather, you see opportunities in the figurative sense, like when you see someone’s point, or see a solution to a puzzle, or see where things are headed. When we speak figuratively about what we saw, we aren’t talking about what we’ve perceived, we’re just talking about what we’ve recognised as being the case. Most people would read the examples above in this figurative way: the business people recognised business opportunities but didn’t literally see them. But I think a literal reading shouldn’t be dismissed so lightly.

To see why, let’s put aside business decisions for a moment. Does it make sense to say that people (literally) see opportunities? An opportunity is a chance to do something – a possibility for action. And there’s a strong line of research in psychology and philosophy that suggests we do see possibilities for action. We can see a chair as offering an opportunity to sit, a muffin as offering an opportunity to eat or a tree as offering an opportunity to climb. We can see a bike as rideable, a ball as catchable or some lips as kissable. And none of this is meant figuratively – just as we see the muffin as brown and as squidgy we see it as edible. Our ability to see these opportunities helps us to get around our environment and to act in the right ways. Working out what you can and cannot do in a given situation would be extremely laborious and so the ability to see your options saves you a great deal of work.

Once you’re on board with the idea of (literally) seeing opportunities for action, is it such a stretch to think we can see business opportunities? The difference seems to be in what kinds of opportunity you’re seeing. Seeing opportunities to eat, climb or catch is one thing, but seeing opportunities to harness technology, transform industries or connect people is quite another. The actions implicated in the business opportunities are much more complex than the actions implicated in the ordinary examples. But how complex is too complex? Some of the ordinary cases studied in psychology look pretty darn complicated: think of a chess player’s ability to see an opportunity for a multi-stage attack. Complexity alone shouldn’t rule out the claim that we can perceive opportunities. This isn’t to say that recognising business opportunities is always perceptual – a lot of the time you have to explicitly work out that an opportunity is there. But in at least some cases business opportunities really are perceived.

This line of thought has an interesting result: the world of the business expert looks different to the world of the business novice. Looking at exactly the same situation, the expert and the novice will see different opportunities. Again, this fits neatly with what we already know about other kinds of expertise. The expert climber sees opportunities for climbing that the expert cannot. The same goes for the expert cricketer and their perception of catching opportunities, and the expert chess player and their perception of attacking opportunities. One of the hallmarks of expertise is the ability to see opportunities immediately without having to work out that they’re there. I think that business expertise is no different: business experience allows you to literally see opportunities that others can’t.

Some Help Through the Moral Maze

Life in business is packed with ethical decisions. Everything you do has potential ethical ramifications and you’ve somehow got to navigate the right path. Perhaps you need to decide whether a certain use of clients’ data is permissible, whether it’s ok to make major changes to employees’ pension scheme or whether there’s a responsibility to invest in making your business more green. The lawyers might be able to tell you what it’s legal to do, but the challenge is to work out what it’s right to do. Ethical decisions like these are hard: the issues are complicated, the stakes are high and most of us only have minimal training in how to navigate the moral maze. And to make matters worse, there’s a load of psychological studies showing that our ordinary ethical judgements are unreliable and subject to serious biases (Schwitzgebel & Cushman offer a neat summary).

Faced with all this it would be reasonable to conclude that your ethical judgements might not be up to snuff, and that you should call upon the help of an expert. That’s what we normally do when faced with decisions we aren’t in a position to make ourselves: if you have a difficult decision about tax liability, you consult a tax expert; if you want to know what the weather will be like for the office party, you consult a meteorologist. So it stands to reason that if you want to know what the ethical thing to do is, you should consult an ethics expert. After all, there are a wealth of philosophy academics specialising in ethics (not to mention a fair few consultants who sell themselves as ethical experts). So why not call on one of them? Actually, things aren’t quite so straightforward. Being an expert in ethics isn’t like being an expert in tax or weather, and the whole idea of consulting an ethics expert gets us into uncomfortable territory. Philosopher Sarah McGrath notes that this is a bit counter-intuitive.

This asymmetry emerges when we look more closely at how we identify experts and how we make use them to guide our decisions.

How do you spot an ethics expert?

The first difficulty with consulting an ethics expert is identifying someone as an ethics expert in the first place. When you’re working out whether someone’s well-placed to help you with your tax policy, you can look at their track record of reducing a business’s tax liability. When working out which weather service to use, you can look at their track record of predicting the weather correctly. But what do you do when looking for an ethics expert? If the weather expert predicts rain you can look out the window to see whether they’re right. But if an ethicist says that certain uses of client data are morally permissible, how do you know whether they’re correct? There’s no record that tells you which of their ethical judgements were true and which turned out to be false. You might be able to check their knowledge of moral theories, or their skills in applying ethical principles, but this won’t give you what you need. Knowing an ethical theory only helps if it’s the right ethical theory and applying ethical principles only helps if they’re the right ethical principles. What you need is someone who knows what the right ethical theories and principles are!

Perhaps you should knuckle down and work out for yourself whether the ethicist’s judgements are right. After all, C.D. Broad points out:

This means there’s nothing to stop you working out for yourself whether an ethics expert has made the right call. The difficulty here is that if you could work out for yourself which judgements are right and wrong, you wouldn’t need an ethics expert anymore! Brad Hooker captures the dilemma nicely:

If it takes an expert to know an expert, perhaps you should look at who the community of ethicists identifies as an expert. The difficulty here is that ethics is replete with deeply entrenched disagreements. A pair of ethicists might recognise one another as experts but disagree completely on what the right thing to do is in a situation. This means that if you want to know whose advice to take, knowing who’s recognised as an expert won’t be any use. Worries like this have even pushed some philosophers, like C.D. Broad, to deny that there’s such a thing as an ethics expert.

Trust me, I’m an expert!

You’re already in a bit of a pickle here but, for the sake of argument, let’s say that you do manage to identify an ethical expert whose judgements you trust (Matheson et al have suggested some ways of partially overcoming the hurdles above). The next problem is with whether it’s appropriate to defer to their ethical judgements. Your super-reliable tax expert might say ‘I can’t explain to you the methods we used to calculate our recommendation, but if you do this you’ll halve your tax liability’, and your super-reliable weather service might say ‘I can’t explain to you the science behind our prediction, but rain tomorrow is likely.’ In these cases it seems appropriate to defer to the expert’s judgement. The whole point of having an expert is that they know more about the topic at hand than you do, so there comes a point where you have to trust in their expertise. You can reasonably say ‘it doesn’t look like it’ll rain to me, but you’re the expert!’. But things aren’t quite the same for expert ethical judgements. If an ethics expert says ‘you have no responsibility to invest in making your business more green’ there’s something very uncomfortable about replying ‘that doesn’t sound ethical to me, but you’re the expert’. Brad Hooker captures this asymmetry:

Now things are looking really bad. Even if you manage to identify someone who reliably makes the right ethical judgements, there’s something ethically problematic about deferring to their advice!

A Better Approach

What should we make of all this? Should we scrap the idea of finding and using ethical experts and just stick to struggling through the moral maze by ourselves? I don’t think that’s the right response. Instead, I think we should change our expectations of what an ethics expert can offer. I’ve been talking as if an ethics expert is an expert in judging what’s right and wrong. The real value of an ethical expert is actually much more subtle. Rather than telling you what’s right and wrong, a good ethics expert will be able to:

• Help you recognise ethical issues and ask the right ethical questions
• Provide you with new concepts to help you think through ethical problems
• Facilitate systematic ethical decision-making

The real contribution of ethicists is captured neatly by Jan Crosthwaite:

Even in cases where your ethics expert expresses their own ethical judgements, they should convince you that a certain course of action is right rather than expecting you take it on authority. A true ethics expert will never say ‘Trust me, I’m an ethics expert!’

Overall, consulting ethics experts can be a valuable part of ethical business management. Identifying someone who can tell you what’s right or wrong is problematic, but identifying a skilled ethical cartographer needn’t be. Deferring to an ethics expert’s judgement is morally dubious, but letting them help you navigate the ethical terrain might be the most responsible thing to do. Ethical expertise isn’t about making your ethical judgements for you – it’s about helping you to make those judgements for yourself. Why think I’m right about this? Trust me, I’m a philosopher!

ABOVE: AN ETHICAL CARTOGRAPHER IN ACTION

References

C.D. Broad, Ethics and the History of Philosophy, London: Routledge (1952)

Brad Hooker (1998), ‘Moral Expertise’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 6, pp. 509–11

Eric Schwitzgebel & Fiery Cushman (2012), ‘Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects
on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers’ Mind & Language, 27(2), pp. 135–153.

Jan Crosthwaite (1995), ‘Moral Expertise: A Problem in the Professional Ethics of Professional Ethicists’, Bioethics, 9(5), pp. 661-379.

Jonathan Matheson, Scott McElreath & Nathan Nobis ‘Moral Experts, Deference and Disagreement’ forthcoming in Moral Expertise: New Essays from Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives.

Sarah McGrath (2011), ‘Skepticism about Moral Expertise as a Puzzle for Moral Realism’, Journal of Philosophy, 108 (3), pp. 111-137.

Note: This blog is based on collaborative work I did at the University of Sussex with the brilliant Andre Almeida

Isn’t ethics a bit of a drag? Often, we think of ethical considerations as restrictions on the way we act. Without ethics we’d be free to do what we want, but with ethics there are boundaries that severely limit our options. On this gloomy view, self-interest and obligation are forever in tension. This understanding of ethics isn’t just implicit in our everyday thinking about what it is to be an ethical individual – it’s also implicit in our our everyday thinking about what it is to be an ethical business. I think this gloomy view should be scrapped in favour of a more optimistic approach to business ethics. But before I introduce that approach, let me say a bit more about what’s wrong with the gloomy view of business ethics.

On the gloomy view, an unethical business can simply pursue its own profit, whereas an ethical business must sometimes act against its own financial interests in favour of the wider interests of society. A business free from obligations to pay taxes, to make philanthropic donations, to care for its employees and to respect its stakeholders is a business that is free to maximise profit. A business that chooses to meet its obligations is most likely a less profitable business, since doing the right thing inevitably costs money. Acting ethically might be good for society, but it’s basically bad for business.

Many academics working in business ethics think that this miserable attitude to ethics is pervasive in the business world. Porter & Kramer, for instance, argue that economic theories have enshrined the problematic idea that ‘…to provide societal benefits, companies must temper their economic success’.

The gloomy view is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it gives being good a bad reputation. Any self-respecting business person wants what’s best for their business, so if acting ethically inevitably means compromising on the success of your business then ethics becomes burdensome – it becomes an obstacle on the path to business success. Second, the gloomy view makes ethical business hard to sustain. With profit and ethics pulling in opposite directions, profit will sometimes win when it shouldn’t. This is a particular risk when a business is going through hard times. As we’ve seen with the fallout from both the economic crash and the recent Brexit vote, when the profitability of a business is threatened philanthropic projects are often the first things to be thrown overboard. Third, the gloomy view entails a muddled view of what the point of business really is. Is the purpose of a business to help others or to help itself? If it’s both, how on earth do we balance ethical and financial considerations when evaluating a business? With a double or triple bottom line, which bottom line should get priority when? This muddle makes the successful navigation of business decisions very difficult.

Hopefully I’ve done enough to convince you that the gloomy view is no good. But if I’m right that it’s no good, what should we replace it with? Thankfully, philosophy has provided some insights into what it means to be an ethical individual that transfer nicely to a business context. The idea that acting ethically means acting against your self-interest is associated (perhaps unfairly) with the 18^th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant’s contemporary, the great poet, dramatist and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, skillfully mocks the gloomy view in the following epigram:

Schiller argued that the absurd view of ethics captured in this epigram ‘…could easily tempt a weak understanding to seek moral perfection along the path of a gloomy and monkish ascetic.’ Against such a view, Schiller suggested that the truly virtuous person is one for whom duty and desire are in harmony. If you have what Schiller calls ‘a beautiful soul’, you simply want to do what’s ethical. Such a person doesn’t have to put their self-interest aside in favour of doing the right thing because, for them, doing the right thing is in their self-interest. Their desire and their conscience push in exactly the same direction, so no compromise is needed. Of course, most of us fall a long way short of Schiller’s ideal of the beautiful soul. Nevertheless, pursuing an ethical life becomes a lot less gloomy once you recognise that the ultimate aim is to bring duty and self-interest into harmony.

How can we apply Schiller’s model of virtue to business ethics? Schiller’s ideal is for duty and self-interest to be in harmony, so the virtuous business is one in which being profitable and being ethical come hand-in-hand. Such a business would make money by doing the right thing and do the right thing by making money. There would be no trade-off between financial and ethical considerations because the business will have developed in such a way that these two things push in the same direction. The ideal business isn’t one that compromises profits in favour of societal benefits, but rather one that makes profit by bringing societal benefits.

How could profit and ethics be in harmony like this? Let me give you an example. Grameen Bank was founded by Chittagong Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976. Yunus introduced the practice of ‘microcredit’, giving loans as small as US$27 to people below the poverty line. The societal benefits of these loans were formidable, lifting countless families out of poverty by offering them the means to help themselves and to avoid predatory loan sharks. But the really interesting thing about Grameen Bank is that it makes a profit. It isn’t a charity that gives away money for the benefit of others and against its own self-interest. Rather, it’s a profitable enterprise that makes its profit by doing something beneficial to society, and ploughs that profit back into the business to yield more social benefits and more profit. Grameen Bank thus exemplifies how a good business can harmonise profit and ethics: the actions that make money are actions that bring societal benefit, and only by bringing those benefits can the business continue to make money.

Scrapping the gloomy view of business ethics in favour of this Schiller-inspired view promises to overcome the problems I mentioned earlier. First, business ethics needn’t have a bad press since business people can pursue what’s best for their business at the same time as pursuing what’s best for society. Second, business ethics needn’t be hard to sustain since there doesn’t have to be a difficult trade-off between profit and ethics, as the two push in the same in the same direction. This applies even when a business is going through hard times (it’s worth noting that Grameen Bank opened in New York a year before the financial crisis yet managed to grow steadily regardless). Third, business people can avoid a muddled understanding of what the point of business is. The point is to profitably do good, so in the ideal business the question of how to balance profit and ethics simply won’t arise.

Just as achieving Schiller’s ideal of the virtuous person is easier said than done, meeting this ideal of the virtuous business is pretty hard work. But lofty ideals are a valuable guide even if we can never fully achieve them. I’m reminded of the observation that even if you have no hope of reaching the North Pole, a compass can still help you head in the right direction. Perhaps the Schillerian ideal of the ‘beautiful business’ can act as a kind of ethical compass, and as a reminder that ethics doesn’t have to be a drag.