Businessmen, as a general rule, are less ethical than the rest of us. To succeed in business, one needs a strong, ruthless character – that much is obvious. What is less obvious, but a truism nevertheless, than ruthlessness unhinged and untamed can get out of hand and destroy the ethical inherence of a person. Being ethical is a quality that is strenuous in most humans at best. If a ruthless person gets away with dubious practices a few times, honesty and ethics as a policy becomes less meaningful to such people.
This is the reason we hear about people like Bernard Madoff, the good folks at Enron, the folks at Haliburton and BP of the oil spill fame, and the rest of the crooked corporate lot. They may have started out good, but the immense wealth that just a little bending of the rules gave them, and the fact that they could get away with it so many times, led them to lose their moral fiber. The result: unscrupulous, dangerous men who are white collar murderers and destroyers of people.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, this is just the people who were stupid enough to have been caught. There’s worse fish deeper down, smart and unscrupulous people who never get caught; people whose unethical practices ultimately destroy a lot of good things in our world.
Of these last group, there are hundreds and thousands. Every factory chimney that belches out black smoke has a murderous individual behind it. Every radioactive waste disposal site that destroys our drinking water system and pollutes our air has a smooth faced criminal behind it. Although there are, indeed, ethical businessmen, their numbers are too low to be able to balance out the criminals.
In such a situation, it is very important to help people imbibe a strong sense of business ethics. If nothing else helps, maybe they will remember they have children!