9.1. Introduction

In this book, we have developed some characteristics related to evolution and change in civilizations. They are composed of three main factors: lack of skills, ignorance and greedy attitudes.

We will just remind ourselves that this has been the case for a very long time. We can quote the French essayist and moralist Jean de la Bruyère [DEL 88]: “Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.”

This means that our world is never perfect: according to the changes occurring in our society and our lives, there will always be problems of justice, equality and ethics. To quote de la Bruyère [DEL 96] again, we can say: “life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think”.

Ethics is neither a lyrical subject nor an obsolete subject intended to satisfy skeptics. We must always fight to reduce greed and replace forgotten values, conventional rituals and references by rules of ethical behavior, leaving room for messianic salvation and justice.

As in the Rotary association (with our motto: “serve first”), ethics is always a “life” to build and not a grace to receive.

Ethics is what allows us to increase our space of liberty, our number of possible choices, and ultimately it preserves freedom and peace.

All throughout this book, we have tried to explain why greed is such a societal bankruptcy and why and how ethics is able to overcome the failures of current social and political systems. This is again of utmost importance since we are living in complex systems subject to holism and nonlinear dynamics.

Also, we must not forget that our world is again becoming spiritual (see Chapter 8 on Ethics and Spirituality) as in a periodic phenomenon, and that strong relationships exist between ethics and sustainability. Otherwise, if we continue ignoring such basic principles, nature will undertake a kind of societal “cleaning”: indeed, humankind is only an avatar of nature, we are just an element of a large puzzle, interdependent living beings.

9.2. The crisis is still here

The crisis is not a simple economic crisis. Analysis of the present situation is based upon a complex holistic approach in a multidimensional world. It can be summarized as follows:

• – A failure of meanings: traditional landmarks, values and references are undermined. The existence of human beings cannot just be reduced to production and consumption. There is an ethical void that causes a crisis in our basic foundations and underlying mechanisms of life.
• – The death of ideologies: instrumental or mechanical rationality still remains (it consists of bringing together the best means and resources to achieve utilitarian ends). There is an axiological doubt (which is related to moral and ethical values) in relation to the progress of life and its values.
• – Individualism and selfishness: these are characterized by two main trends:
  • - the first (individualistic) revolution occurred in 1789 with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The second (societal) revolution took place during the 1950s, when more and more people began to focus on themselves. Solidarity, as expressed in natural disasters and described in the work of Durkheim, has quite disappeared. Narcissism became predominant and, through social networking, we are more and more interested in the details and intimacies of the individual (idiosyncrasy or self-admiration). Such individualism can lead to specific and extreme decisions, e.g. Durkheim’s understanding of sucicide as due to, lack of integration or isolation in a society defined by exclusivity. Nowadays, the media and the public have a pessimistic vision of our society; nevertheless, the suicide rate is stagnating, except in agriculture (still close to nature). Today, the cult of personal fulfillment, like hedonism, is of key importance!
  • - the power of world domination is not new and was already suggested by Dionysius. Nowadays, this trend is accelerated thanks to advances in sciences, the effects of standardization, etc. In the cognitive world where we live, the knowledge gap tends to perform a kind of partitioning of population. This partitioning is becoming social, technical, economic, etc. Technology is a key factor within this evolution: we need it. We are fighting ourselves to attract the best scientists, researchers and younger generations, to enforce our knowledge, impose our technologies and then to influence economics and dominate the world.
• – The emergence of advanced technologies: these are a source of scientific progresses but they also raise new development opportunities and challenges (such as global warming, GMOs, smarter planet, genomics, etc.):
  • - genomism in itself is a very old ambition related to transhumanism. At the beginning, a new trend is never-money oriented. Our intent is to preserve our health or to compensate some of our defective abilities. Progressively, our ambition evolves and nowadays we are able to increase our human potential in order to better dominate the world. We are becoming an “augmented species”. What happens to the products that surround us also happens to humankind: we have now authorized human cloning. We are developing exoskeletons and artilects, what else? What about new human avatars? What kind of ethics will this lead to?
• – The economic level: many ecological challenges jeopardize the functioning of the economy but economic progress always gives an advantage to human beings. The cost of such a strategy is quite high:
  • - human beings are not just predators. They are becoming exterminators. The PLC and the pace of progress accelerate. Our intent is to make the world evolve faster and faster, to make plants grow faster and faster, to get proteins and prebiotics more quickly and more efficiently. Scientists are liberal people who are manipulated by people more eager than them for power. What interests scientists is mastering and controlling the making of new resources of life, while the interest of most leaders is to divert them to their own profit;
  • - since the 1950s, new modes of socialization have emerged (media systems, social networks, etc.). Before 1968, notions of authority were still strong in families or at school. Henceforth, the public universe, public services, no longer has the same prestige. If the disciplinary order promoted by these organizations used to prevail, permissiveness is now much greater with the new information systems. Until the 1950s, it was necessary to be in the fold. Today, we are interested in the peculiarities, the minorities, the small and unusual clusters, etc. Indeed, minority movements, very sensitive to small initial conditions are able to change the structure of a society (e.g. feminist, lesbian or gay communities). This kind of society that has evolved and been set up since the second half of last century is a post-modern society.

9.3. Post-modernism in detail: the story never ends

During the last century, that is to say, in modern society, the main subject of interest was the “conquering society”: the objective was to propagate universality and conquer Europe through the Revolution or revolutionary projects. It was a break with the blood hierarchy (as in nobility or family businesses). Now, the post-modern society is centered on very specific properties:

• – Disenchantment: a disillusionment with modern values and a declining patriotism.
• – A new mode of consumption: the so-called “cool” consumption comes after the criticism of opulence. We are now looking for quality.
• – The development of corporate culture: we see this expressed and reflected in attempts to create communities. Tönnies and Weber spoke about the opposition between community and society. In French companies, for a long time, there was an opposition between employers and workers. This opposition was very strong during the 1960s–70s. Since then, a completely different trend has been observed: companies are developing this communitarian aspect with efforts to enable employees to become more involved in the company.
• – Attractiveness and self-seduction: seduction in our society is becoming more and more important. It is a general process that tends to organize consumption, information, enterprise, education, morals, ethics, and more. Everyone thinks and acts according to their sensitivity. We no longer communicate within a cluster of manufacturing sites but worldwide with anyone thanks to the new technologies: they develop, however, a person-to-person communication instead of a collective or social communication. The consequence is that each person tends to be disconnected from reality and lives in a euphoric atmosphere. It is a real process of isolation and exclusion.
• – Indifference and nihilism of values: there is a kind of relativism in human values that is related to mass indifference. All values are emptied of their sense. Let us take the example of labor: it is no longer associated with the identity of a person. In the same way, the concept of family is no longer a virtue. Political unions are looking and appealing for candidates. All this is done without any conviction, emotion and empathy. Modernism is a cold and apathetic snake: it is insidious and ubiquitous. The relationship with authority has become devalued and the public domain has narrowed. Tolerance and complacency are now more important than they were before. Regardless of our own values and ethics, democracy becomes associated with indifference, promoting equality instead of justice; diversity is advocated but denies identities and differences; communication and discussions quickly become a class struggle, and so on.
• – Emergence and corporatism: in a company, new uncertainties may appear with the emergence of new products, social changes, the roles of the organization’s stakeholders (with the blurring of the authoritarian role of managers), and corporate culture. With regard to ambivalences, the concept of paradoxical communication is raised. In organizations, one must be autonomous but also do one’s work; one has rights but also duties. With complexity, anyone can be subject to opposing injunctions which are therefore paradoxical. This leads to an increase in people’s fragility and to instabilities but this is necessary for future evolution.
• – Ethics and values in economy: at the economic level, there are many challenges. The producer is also a consumer. Ecology is necessary to avoid the depletion of raw material reserves, energy consumption and pollution. Another challenge is related to the lack of skills, ignorance and greed. Each responsible person in the economy must serve as a model for virtue, avoiding any risk of widespread corruption.

9.4. Consequences: worldwide governance and hyper-democracies

When we can calculate everything, manufacture everything and unanchor not only the simple tasks required in a society but also reconsider the more elaborate tasks such as engineering or decision, is this the world we want to have? What about our freedom? Is this ethics?

The rights, the BDI of each of us, must be respected whatever their gender. But when a mother or a father of a family neglects his or her own progeny in order to satisfy his or her personal ambitions, do we live in an ethical society?

When one rejects the love and warmth of the family for the coldness of power and a disproportionate personal ambition, claiming that children can manage on their own, is this not the beginning of the end of civilization? We are very far from what is happening in the primitive wildlife: is this ethics?

When one ignores the very basic principles of evolution, it is the precepts of the Old Testament that we reject, it is the story of the Tower of Babel with its disproportionate ambitions, it is the need to conquer a paradise that we will lose. It is the problem of ethics that can no longer control a world that has become indecent and insane.

9.5. Business ethics: new trends and perspective

For some people, ethics appears as a solution to problems linked to social phenomena. Globalization and the loss of values and benchmarks make us seek answers to this uncertain and destabilizing context. We need new and better fitting landmarks and references to reinforce those already existing and we will try to find them in ethics. The objective is to again focus our efforts on moral values, on things and thoughts that we believe as being basic and unquestionable, or even as a set of assertions. Indeed, ultimately what is most feared is the constant questioning of our benchmarks, values and references. In fact, everyone always wants better, more just, more beautiful, more harmonious, more compelling items.

For explanation purposes, human beings are always trying to sort, classify, cluster, rank or discriminate everything, to understand, know and compare everything, in order to be convinced that nothing of what they established can be a mistake. It is a question of sustainability.

This is also the reason why most of the managers or leaders imbued with idealism and self-satisfaction do not agree that they are, like any human, fallible beings. It is not ethics or courage that stifles them: they are never wrong. To save their fame, they do not hesitate to push faults onto others, fellow workers or even friends or relatives; to blame others, sometimes punishing them unfairly. With the individualism that characterizes the new managers (class “Y”), such non-ethical behaviors are becoming more and more frequent.

What human beings establish always needs to be perfect, utopian, but the reality is far from being utopian. For instance, some managers demand more from others than they require from themselves. Ethics can also be a problem since we cannot have an answer to everything. For example, how do we know where the powers and authority of a manager begin and end? Where does abuse begin?

But what if professional ethics were not applied? How to judge severity? What counts as an offense? What type of sanction to apply?

Application of business ethics depends on many things such as the context, the activity, the personality of each person, the way in which everyone works and the sensitivity of each person, all things that will generate a difference in perception and points of view. This can nuance or obscure a business ethics appraisal. That is why we often resort to the judiciary for malpractice or professional faults when it is often more advisable to recover a fault by settling it, internally, through a job evaluation meeting.

The application of professional ethics is a problem in a world submitted to a steady acceleration and permanent evolution, in which the laws and their adaptation are continuously changing.

Within this context, the sharp and difficult questions are to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis in order to take into account small or big problematics, the complexification of everything in nature and the deviances of human beings.

Anyway, business ethics can be seen as a prospective for the future. It enables us to implement a well-defined and balanced development framework and to think about a reliable and sustainable development of decision and control systems. This is essential in all the sectors of activity. Indeed, in any action and in terms of main guidelines, all the situations have to be thought, analyzed, challenged and realized, both rationally and emotionally with our consciousness. These are part of the fundamental principles of good management of a company or team that have to be usefully oriented.

9.6. Ethics of consideration: a new concept

This important notion has been developed by Michel Volle [VOL 14b].

9.6.2. Generalization

Thanks to robotics, more and more repetitive tasks are going to be automated. It is the case in industry but also in finance (fast trading), in banking (help desks), medicine (diagnosis), and more. More and more people will be assigned to designing, development (innovation) and marketing tasks.

The relationships with all the stakeholders are of key importance since everybody needs pertinent information, formation and financial conditions to define the end product, its use, and to determine the added values that are required to get the best fitting decisions and equilibriums.

This is called the “commerce of consideration”.

This is a crucial point: a human brain that knows or believes it is not being listened to will stop functioning properly: his capability is decreased up to full sterilization (neutering). Therefore, in a networked workplace or production system, the one who brings a significant information related to the global process or general interest, and who feels his proposal is ignored will become disconnected from the whole system. He will be naturally excluded from the interconnected system since the links will be slowing down or withdrawn.

To give consideration to anybody, to maintain the resilience of an interconnected system, to listen and act towards better participation and cooperation is the result of commerce of consideration.

The one who is obsessed and seeks power loses the contact and control of his children or subordinates. It disconnects him from reality. He forgets that he is going to be isolated and that he will no longer have power. This is what happens in the family, in the economy, in politics.

The commerce of consideration is of key importance. It is the privileged concept that ensures the cohesion between:

• – the workforce that operates a product or service (mainly repetitive and automated);
• – the mastermind dedicated to non-repetitive tasks that require initiative, managing the unknown or the uncertain and treating unpredictable phenomena;
• – the social network that generates and brings out BDIs and needs.

In terms of conceptual integration, the ethics of consideration (oriented toward relationships) covers most of the human and political aspects of ways of life. It is fully compatible with and complementary to the two already existing concepts: the ethics of responsibility (for any rational reasoning) and the ethics of conviction (more emotionally oriented). This allows us to draw the following figure.

The ethics of consideration that has been introduced here provides a great advantage since it can be extended to several items subject to vulnerability. For instance:

• – Living beings who are weak and excluded from the society.
• – All the living organisms the evolution of which is dependent on human activity. They comprise animals, plants, microorganisms, etc. and more generally our whole environment: we are all interdependent together. The nature of the relationships between all the elements are of key importance in a BECC.

9.7. Toward a more Sustainable Ethics

Throughout this book, we have seen that Business Ethics was based on an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of conviction which were progressively amended with new concepts such as the ethics of naturalism and of consideration.

In fact ethics is dependent on many factors as described in the following graph.

As we can see, and as it is in the mind of many people, the concept of Sustainable Ethics is often linked with System Complexity. In our global context, ‘sustainability’ expresses the fact that most people are afraid of losing control of a “complex” phenomenon; there are too many factors in interaction and we do not know how to control and handle Business Ethics. How to implement it when we need to preserve a situation in the face of non-understandable and apparently irreversible change? Under these conditions, is sustainability a marketing trap? Or rather a real and primary concern? Considering what is happening in our world, we can’t yet tell, given that complexity is the normal evolution of nature.

With regard to our experience, and as stated in Sustainability Calling [MAS 15a], sustainability is driven by specific codes. In other words, to drive and manage a system developed by humankind, we have to integrate the following codes, in analogy to the five former elements able to unify the construction of the world. They are:

1. 1) The Code of Matter: with its own mechanisms related to aggregation, growth, gravitation → quantum physics.
2. 2) The Code of Life: DNA → biological constructs, the different brains, the differents living organisms, those in our body, etc..
3. 3) The Code of Thought: the main brain, its capacity to reason and develop thinking → emotions → consciousness.
4. 4) The Code of Energy: thermodynamic physics → entropy, since one main objective of Ethics is to reduce the entropy of the global system, etc.
5. 5) The Code of Complexity: the new geometries (chaos and fractals) and NLDS → network theory, neural networks, etc. which are the basis of artificial intelligence, cognitive activity and advanced organizations.

Under these conditions, sustainable ethics is simply an ethics that fulfills and integrate all these codes. If we analyze what has been developed in this book, we can say that task is partly covered; ethics, however, is inseparable from questions and concerns related to sustainability.

Ethics is often seen as philosophically-based concepts: we tried to open up that approach to ethics and to adapt it to the business. We also tried to integrate many advances common to our society and technologies. However, there are still a lot of advances to take into consideration in order to get a more consistent and pertinent sustainable ethics.

So, the global or sustainable ethics we propose differs from the common literature and philosophies in four ways:

1. 1) Cross-disciplinary approach. It contains many definitions, concepts and explanations in order to provide a foundation for tackling complexity and sustainability and better managing our changing world.
2. 2) Pragmatic grasp and tricks. It is illustrated with examples coming from widely different origins. Thus, it is not a theoretical book or handbook describing philosophical developments.
3. 3) Wide targeting. It addresses the complete scope of all the activities we may have in a society in its many adjacent professional domains, as encountered in the Rotary associations.
4. 4) Applicability. This book tried to detail or explain the application of various concepts, experiences, methods and tools in various truly complex situations.

9.8. Ethics: evaluation and measurement

The evaluation of ethics raises a number of problems. When the objective is not control-oriented (which seems advisable in the context of a program aiming to enable actors to take ownership of the business ethics approach), a system of self-evaluation must be implemented. This system can be biased as soon conventional survey techniques are used.

For instance, at the level of quantitative analysis, it is important to note that data scientists often use the notion of statistical means. When comparing qualitative criteria within a population, it must be recalled that the most reliable way is to use the notion of median. Without going into the details of this approach, it will simply be said that it is the most appropriate way for such measurements.

This is why it is preferable to use a projective method based on the scenarios methodology. This method consists in placing individuals in typical situations featuring decision-making problems in the business environment and proposing that they analyze them. This approach is based on decision-making simulations. The different possible decisions are proposed to the individuals (employees or managers) who will be able to evaluate them from different angles. This evaluation allows one both to analyze the individuals’ behavior (through an online system guaranteeing their anonymity) and to identify the situations that are subject to the most problems in a given job or activity sector of a company.

What are the expected results of an ethical evaluation? The implementation of an analysis approach is aimed at better defining and measuring the feeling the management may have about business ethics. It mainly concerns:

• – a methodology to fulfill the needs of stakeholders;
• – an innovative approach to enhancing teamwork;
• – tools for reinforcing the notions of ethics within the professional values of the enterprise;
• – a better reliability and sustainability in operational management and decision making;
• – increased comfort of customers and partners through reassuring communication [NIL 03, NIL 06];

In such a ways a set of about five indicators can be defined and followed accordingly.

9.9. A future vision of networking and Business Ethics

Among the historical actors of the space industry like SpaceX (Elon Musk), Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Thales or Airbus it is worth mentioning OneWeb (Greg Wyler) who just raised $1.2 billion to set up the so-called ‘OneWeb constellation’. It is an ambitious project of 900 satellites whose aim is to offer cheap internet access to all the inhabitants of our planet. Indeed, access to the web is an essential prerequisite for economic development, especially for “the other 3 billion” people who are not yet connected to the internet due to insufficient or failing infrastructures.

The OneWeb project has to be associated with the fact that nearly 50 billions RFID-type sensors (or similar features) are going to be used to collect information or to connect any object through the IOT. Here, it is important to note they will be globally interconnected everywhere, in all parts of the world.

One argued result is related to so-called ‘security’: some structured organization could be able to know everything, follow the evolution, and then anticipate everything about each interconnected object. Google can of course exploit all the data collected and utilize Big Data processing: Google, initially known as a data exploration service (with search engine) will gradually keep control over the IOT and become, for instance, a transportation provider (Google cars). It can also provide specific information to security agencies in many countries and replace them (as super-governance). There is no difference between marketing, politics and security: there is no limit in terms of a business model. The same thinking may apply to Microsoft. But where is the freedom of everyone? Or is the new morality that of the Big Data market? With autonomy and mobility in transportation, where are the responsibilities and how do we allocate them in case of accident or embezzlement? Everything, any opportunity is subject to questioning and challenges: this is the main principle of ambivalence in nature.

When a paradigm change occurs, how do we adapt and apply ethics?

Another example will now be detailed, just to understand how the face of our world is changing. We will illustrate this scenario with Amazon but any different worldwide company can be quoted. This example is based on e-commerce. Through a worldwide telecommunication service, new opportunities (in terms of BDIs) can emerge from social networking, but also new situations at the level of free market competition: here, for instance, some forecasters will say that Amazon may “control the underlying infrastructure of our economy”¹. Is this possible? Is this ethical?

We often talk about Amazon as though it is a worldwide retailer: it sells more clothing, electronics, toys and books than any other company. Last year, in 2016, Amazon had a sales revenue going towards $150 billion (in the USA, the $3.6 trillion retail market has shifted to online business, and Amazon covers a part of that share). Walmart, however, had a much more profitable business with a sales revenue approaching $490 billion. In comparison their market cap is around $250 Billion for both². Here, we can try to understand why investors value Amazon more than, or the as same as, Walmart?

As for mobile games (Candy Crush or Call of Duty), the objective of a business is to reason in terms of dynamic evolution rather than market share: to get a hit, this does not require a specific organization to copy the competition or reach a given revenue but to fulfill the trends of a new market and to take risks.

To be more precise, in 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine like Google. Today, most people go to Amazon or eBay. Moreover, people ignore the fact that Amazon knows everything about us (same as for Google or Microsoft) and threaten our freedom.

The Amazon website, already a dominant platform for digital commerce, is also able to dictate terms and prices to suppliers, fashions and trends to customers, to connect decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas and then to deliver business and financial information in order to influence important societal choices.

Taking into consideration their own potential role within the society, the large companies like Amazon are a weapon for shaking down some suppliers. For instance:

1. 1) Amazon could alert the police with regard to the many counterfeiters that sell fake Nike shoes on their website. As a consequence, they pushed Nike to offer a full line of products on Amazon³.
2. 2) More recently, Amazon announced its intention to buy Whole Foods Market. Buying Whole Foods would help Amazon expand its business and primary role in e-commerce. It would also enable it to gain a network of fresh-food warehouses in order to become a viable major online grocer. Here, the critical success factor is based on making last-mile deliveries.

This can be critical because owning the infrastructure needed to quickly deliver packages to doorsteps is a key component of maintaining and sustaining an oligopoly in online commerce. But this is also an opportunity to develop a new and disruptive way to conduct another business.

In terms of business ethics, is it a simple question of the competitiveness factor? How to recompose the landscape of already existing companies such as UPS or FedEx? How to prepare for future BDIs?

How to share the specific interests of each stakeholder? What complementary role can be attributed to the stakeholder? How to define a general interest? What is the right solution: the speciation or the diversification of the species or economic actors?

It is time to design and implement a kind of meta-ethics issued from the collective consciousness.

9.10. Main conclusions

Business ethics involves all of us, in a thousand ways and every day. From medical secrecy to industrial secrecy and professional confidentiality, we already use ethics without knowing it, knowing that this is not unknown to us.

Complexification of the world is going on and mandatorily implies the complexification of the ethics concept. More studies and deep thinking are still necessary to improve the notion of business ethics. Here, to explain the difficulty of this statement, we will just review and summarize a few reasons we already mentioned:

• – Networks and lobbies: the influence of the press and the media was previously discussed but little mention was made of the grasp on the business community and elected representatives by lobbyists: they do not impose laws but they co-produce them and then participate in the malfunctioning of the political system. We are here not in the ‘formative’, but the ‘informative’. In terms of ethics: who governs? Think tanks? The journalists? Intellectuals?
• – Robotics: robotics are increasingly involved in DSS and tend to help or replace human decision-makers. In this case, do machines have a morality? Do they have an ethics? The autonomous car (Tesla Google for example) will be able to predict many decisions. Extending this principle to people, we can raise some questions about societal ethics: who decides for the old and weak and dictates to them a conduct? Why not lead them to suicide and exclusion for the benefit of an unhealthy interest?
• – Algorithms and AI: these have a growing influence on jobs, purchases, health, etc. As we have seen, every innovation is supposed to create employment. Today, however, some are in doubt:
  • - if the evolutive process is regular there will be no ethical problem, since the emergence of new jobs will not penalize the population.
  • - if we create more uncertainty and a lack of confidence then innovation will become inapplicable because human society will reject such progress and proceed to chaos.

These are unlikely scenarios, since truth is always an equilibrium between extreme situations; however, this should not prevent us from focusing on the notion of ethics in terms of the emergence of ideas during the design, development and implementation of our future.

All these above considerations show that business ethics must cover two level of concerns: individual Business Ethics and collective Business Ethics. This allows us to also consider personal ethics and meta-ethics as well.

However, in this context that is also associated with complexification and over-regulation through laws, do we not become a little too dogmatic with our intent to dictate “good and evil” in our behavior, to impose some practices and to forbid others considered less advantageous?

This question arises. No one, at present, can claim to answer it. In any case, our society seems angry at the requirement that BECC frame our professional conduct.