company; it is a recipe for a nation to become wasteful, inefficient, and noncompetitive. There is no escaping this fact: the greater the measure of mutual trust and confidence in the ethics of a society, the greater its economic strength. 4 I do not say the sky is falling here in the United States. I do not think we had a great ethical height in the good old days from which we've been tumbling downhill. We do face ethical and competitive problems, to be sure. We have all been reading about religious leaders who steal from their congregations; Wall Street brokers who profit from their insider status, assorted politicians and influence peddlers, law students who plagiarize, medical professors who falsify their research results, and Pentagon employees who sell classified information. But most of us can agree with Thomas Jefferson that all human beings are endowed with a moral sense — that the average farmer behind a plow can decide a moral question as well as a university professor. Like Jefferson, we can have confidence in the man in the street, whether that street is in Armonk, San Francisco, or Cambridge — or in London, Paris, or Tokyo.'
5 That common moral sense, however, does not come out of nowhere or perpetuate itself automatically. Every generation must keep it alive and flourishing. All of us can think of means to this end. Here are three suggestions.
16
Ethical Buttresses
6 First, we should fortify the practical ethical buttresses that help all of us — from childhood on — know and understand and do exactly what is required of us. The simplest and most powerful buttress is the role model: parents and others who by precept and example set us straight on good and evil, right and wrong. Of all the role models in my own life, I think perhaps the most durable is my grandfather — a flinty New England headmaster whose portrait hangs in my home. To this day, whenever I go by it I check the knot in my tie and stiffen my backbone.
7 There are many other ethical buttresses. Some, despite condescending sophisticates, are simple credos: \trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent\cadet will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.\There are institutionalized buttresses like the honor system, by which college students police themselves — no plagiarism, no cheating on examinations. I find it ludicrous that even divinity schools and law schools and departments of philosophy — not to mention other parts of the university — have to pay proctors to pad up and down the aisles at examination time to make sure nobody is looking at crib notes or copying from a neighbor. A century and a half after Jefferson introduced the honor system at the University of Virginia, it is unfortunate that every college and university in America has not yet
17
adopted it.
8 Finally there are professional standards and business codes of conduct, which spell out strict policies on such things as inside trading, gifts and entertainment, kickbacks, and conflicts of interest. It is naive to believe these buttresses will solve all our problems. But it is equally naive to expect ethical behavior to occur in the absence of clear requirements and consequences.
Can Our Schools Teach Ethics?
9 The time has come to take a hard look at ethical teaching in our schools — and I don't just mean graduate schools of business. We know John Shad is giving the Harvard Business School most of a $30-million endowment to be devoted to studying and teaching ethics. And we know that MIT Sloan School Dean Lester Thurow and other educators have openly disagreed with this undertaking.
10 Let's begin by defining what we are talking about. Many business people facing student audiences have been appalled by knee-jerk assertions that it is open-and-shut immorality to do business in South Africa, to produce weapons for the military, to decide against setting up a day-care center, to run a nuclear power plant, or even to make a profit. An enormous amount of work needs to be done to help young people think clearly about complex questions like these, which defy pseudomoralistic answers. They require instead incisive definition and analysis, and a
18
clear-headed understanding of a company's sometimes conflicting responsibilities — to its employees, its stockholders, and its country. And these responsibilities often require some agonizingly difficult choices.
11 I wholeheartedly favor ethical instruction — in a business school or anywhere else in the university — that strengthens such analytical capabilities. I also favor ethical examination of workplace safety, consumer protection, environmental safeguards, and the rights of the individual employee within the organization.
12 But recall what Samuel Johnson once said: If a person doesn't know the difference between good and evil, \leaves our house, let us count our spoons.\If an MBA candidate doesn't know the difference between honesty and crime, between lying and telling the truth, then business school, in all probability, will not produce a born-again convert.
13 Elementary, grass-roots instruction on why it is bad to sneak, cheat, or steal — such instruction in a school of business administration is much too little, far too late. That's not the place to start. The place to start is kindergarten. 14 There are, to be sure, vexing constitutional and other problems over prayer in the classroom. But we need not wait for the debate to end — if it ever does — before we begin to reinvigorate ethical instruction in our schools. We can start now, in kindergarten through twelfth grade, and not by
19
feeding our children some vague abstractions called \I mean we should start with a clear-cut study of the past. Our ethical standards come out of the past — out of our inheritances as a people: religious, philosophical, historical. And the more we know of that past, the more sure-footedly we can inculcate ethical conduct in the future.
15 If you want to know about Tammy Bakker, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan says, read Sinclair Lewis; if you want to know about insider trading, read Ida Tarbell. If you want to know what it is like to operate in a jungle where the individual predator profits as society suffers, read Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. If you want to understand the conflict between the demands of the organization and the conscience of the individual, read Thoreau on civil disobedience and Sophocles's Antigone. If you want to know about civility, read the words of Confucius. And if you want to know about courage, temperance, truthfulness, and justice, read Aristotle or the Bible.
16 When I hear reports that American high school students know little or nothing about Chaucer or Walt Whitman or the Civil War or the Old Testament prophets, what bothers me most is not that they exhibit intellectual ignorance. What bothers me is that they have missed the humane lessons in individual ethical conduct that we find in the annals of world history, the biographies of great men and women, and the works of supreme imaginative literature.
20