Business Ethics – A practical guide to staying out of jail

Published on Linked In Sept 17th 2018

I recently posted an article called ‘Leading ethically in a complex environment’ in which I shared some of my insights from 6 years or so of research and over 20 years teaching ethics. In response to this, some people have asked for a practical ‘cut to the chase’ solution to the ‘ethics issue’ and one that will ‘keep them out of jail’. So here goes: -

Firstly, you need to understand the implications of the points I made in my previous post – specifically that the majority of research on ethics is flawed because of two incorrect assumptions that underpin mainstream theory and our thinking on this topic – these flawed assumptions are: -

1.     That cognitive mechanisms and rational thought dominate the moral reasoning
process.

2.     That bad people do bad things.

The key implication of these two assumptions is that good people recognize moral dilemmas and can logically and rationally think their way through them. Therefore, if you want to improve ethics in the banking industry f…