Ethics in The Global Marketplace Lecture

The transcription discusses ethics in the global marketplace, focusing on questions businesses should ask and the concepts of relativism, moral relativism, and ethnocentrism. Relativism suggests no absolute judgment between cultures, while moral relativism implies no universal moral principles. It warns against accepting all cultural values and the dangers of ethnocentrism, imposing one's values on others. Businesses must negotiate acceptable behavior globally, recognizing differences without condoning unethical practices like bribery. Ethnocentrism involves imposing one's values on other cultures. Okay, hi everyone, so today we are looking at Chapter 4, Ethics in the Global Marketplace. And we're looking specifically at how, what is at stake when conducting businesses locally. It's already difficult conducting business locally. Now, how do businesses and managers and executives and employees, how do they think about ethics when business is conducted globally? And managers should ask certain questions as they encounter ethical situations or ethical dilemmas, and I'm going to read some of these important questions. There are five important questions that they should ask, and often times these questions are not, these questions can change based on the company, the type of business, and the situation. Now, how can we, and the we here is the business, how can we operate in ways that realize the benefits of globalism while also addressing the criticisms of opposition groups? If the business world is truly global, where should I do business and set up my operations? How do I treat my workers based on local customs or on standards set in my home country? How should I deal with controversial issues such as child labor and sweatshops? If bribery is common, should I make payments or not? And so these are all questions, the first two questions you'll realize that these are questions that business owners should ask as they are setting up their businesses. And the last three questions really focus on now that I've got the business set up and I'm operating globally, then how do I think about that? How do I think about ethics, the ethics that are involved in operating in different cultures? Now, ethical relativism, ethical relativism is a major topic in this chapter, and my focus for this lecture is on relativism, moral relativism, and ethnocentrism. And the question really is, as business owners or managers or even employees working in the global sphere, what should I do when values conflict between home country and host country? All right? And there are two unacceptable and opposite approaches, and these are relativism and ethnocentrism. Let's talk a little bit more about what relativism is, or moral relativism. But, you know, to do that, I think we first need to talk about relativism itself. What is relativism? Now, relativism is the view or the idea that what's right in one culture may be wrong in another. And just to hear that definition of relativism, you might say, oh, okay, I get it. People are different. People do things differently in different parts of the world. But it's more than just that. It's also that there really is no way of judging between the two cultures. So while on the one hand we say it's particularly different, you know, you know what's right in one culture may not necessarily be right in another culture. While it's that, it's a bit more than that. It is that there's no way of judging if this culture is right or if this culture is wrong. There's absolutely no way of doing that. And so there's no way to prove or to verify that one culture is wrong or the other is right. So it's all very much relative. It's really relative to the culture. Now, here's how you might think of that. Imagine a UFO is landed in Toronto with a bunch of aliens, all right? They're coming from some far off planet. And they've come to Earth to observe our way of life. And after spending some time in Toronto, they decide to go traipsing around the Earth, you know, different parts of the Earth, observing us Earthlings as we do our thing. And so after observing all of us in different parts of the world, these aliens would conclude that there is really no right or wrong way to do things with us, all right, because it's all relative to the culture. And they might conclude further that it's really all a matter of cultural norms. And so this kind of relativism may seem as if, you know, you're doing the right thing. It's as if you're saying, well, these people are different. Why are we judging them on that? You know, they're different. They're living in a different country. That's what they do. So, you know, it's relative to that country or that culture. But if we do that, all right, we might say, we might think, well, that not judging a culture is the right thing to do, all right? You're accepting them for who they are. But you might want to pause a while, pause a while, and think about certain atrocities like what happened in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust. And think about cultures where young girls, not yet teenagers are given to grown men as bribes, you know, 10 and 11 and 12. And then you might want to also apply this here to business. And if you were to apply it to the business world, then now think about bribes and corruption. So when that happens, if we're thinking about bribes and corruption, do we then sit in our offices here in Toronto and say, well, you know, people are different. People do things differently in different parts of the world. And who am I really to judge if this culture, if the bribes in this culture, if it's okay? All right? And in certain cultures, these things, you know, if you really think about it, they aren't just right, they are sometimes, they're not considered immoral. And so in certain cultures where bribe is a norm, they may not be even illegal or not be considered immoral. And let's go back to the Nazi Germany example. In Nazi Germany, Hitler made it legal to kill a whole group of people just like that for no reason. And so if you are a relativist, like a pure relativist, you may be inclined to say, well, you know, he was a monster, but he was doing what's right for Germany. You know, that's what those people see as moral. And who am I to impose my morality on them? So if you're a, you know, pure relativist. Now I know that, you know, we don't feel like that, you know, none of us would think like that. When confronted with the atrocities of the Holocaust, relativist thinking, this kind of relativist thinking that, well, you know, he was doing it because that was, you know, what was good for that country. And I can't judge him on that because that's a different culture. That kind of relativist thinking is not only useless, it's dangerous, and it's downright repulsive. And so which now brings us to moral relativism. Now that we've talked a little bit about what relativism generally is. Moral relativism is the idea that there's no universal or there are no absolute set of moral principles. It's an understanding of morality that says to each his own. Or we might also think about the saying, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Now imagine if all societies and cultures were to accept each other's views of how things should be. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine if we were to accept the different values of people in different parts of the world. Pause a while and think about that for a minute. If we were to think, well, you know, that's their culture. They've got to do what they want to do. You know, today we are increasingly interconnected. And what affects people in other parts of the world, you know, we get that because of that increasing interconnectedness. And so if we were to think like that, all right, we would be essentially saying that there are no universal moral principles, right? We'd say, well, you know, people in different parts of the world, they do them and we do us. But that's not true. We know that when we talked about Immanuel Kant a few weeks ago, he talked about universal moral principles. And for example, think about stealing. Stealing is condemned in most cultures. You know, I can't think of a culture where it isn't. Can you? Can you think of a culture where stealing is not condemned? So therefore, there's some kind of universal principle around stealing. And then if we were to go back to the world of business and apply ethics, you might find that, you know, when we apply ethics in the world of business and finance, it really is about applying common principles of good behavior. That's what it is about. You know, we have to forget about moral relativism because moral relativism does not necessarily work for this kind of global transaction. It doesn't work when we're having these kinds of relationships with people in different parts of the world and from different cultures. So in a global marketplace where companies do business in different parts of the world, this would mean, you know, that we have to clarify and negotiate what is and what is not acceptable behavior. As executives and managers and employees deal with business partners from different parts of the world and from different cultures, it's a constant clarifying and negotiating of what's right and what's wrong. Think about, for example, bribery. It is in some cultures, it's not just okay, it's moral to bribe someone. Some people think that if you're not bribing them that you're not being nice to them. So it's part of the fabric of some cultures. But just because bribery is okay in some cultures, it doesn't mean that, you know, other cultures would have to accept it. And so that's what I mean when I say that, you know, we're constantly clarifying and negotiating what is and what is not acceptable behavior. It doesn't mean that because it's okay in a different culture, bribery is okay in a different culture, that we can't condemn it when we're confronted by it. All right? Which brings me to ethnocentrism. Now ethnocentrism is where we are imposing our own values elsewhere. So if, let's say, in Canada, we like the line to stand in a nice neat line as we get on a bus in another part of the world, people may not necessarily do that. They may probably bus us. And so we're there for vacationing, and we see that, and we're like, oh, my God, these people are animals, and that is, you know, you're applying your standards. But because we do it here, we then apply it there. It's the idea or belief that our way of life, you know, if we speak English language, and because English is the language of comers, we tend to think, well, okay, yeah, we're more superior than those who don't speak English. If we're of a certain race, we tend to think that we're more superior, and they're inferior. If we have a certain religion, we tend to think that, oh, okay, my religion is more superior than theirs. If you come from a certain country, you tend to think, well, oh, I live in a first world country, and they live in a third world country. Therefore, you know, I'm superior to them. We tend to think that all the things we do, that we are superior to others, and that is what I mean when I say we impose our own values elsewhere. We tend to view other cultures from our own standards, and what this does is that it then creates a bias in our ability to objectively judge people, all right? We have, we're unable to objectively judge people's ways of life, and in so doing, we're unable to also make comparisons, because, you know, there's no comparison here. Ours is better, so we can't make those comparisons, and so ethnocentrism itself as a concept, it's a sociological concept. It's used in, when we're talking about how people interact in society, but it has, it's very useful, it has applications in business and business management, because what it does is that it says, if you were to look at the little diagram on your screen, it says, you know, I am right, and I am right really here. It's my culture is right. I am right. No matter the context, others are wrong, end of story. So only my values matter. That's ethnocentrism. Now, let's try to apply that to business. Imagine that you're a manager of a company, or maybe a VC of a company, and you're thinking about, you know, entertaining a merger with a company in a different country, but because that company, that company is headquartered, or that company has most of its operations in a different country, one that may be a developing country. Sometimes people call those countries third world countries. One that may be a developing country, you may tend to think, well, that oh, there are several countries. We live in a first world country, then they are inferior to us. And so these kinds of ethnocentric understandings may then, you know, create problems for the acquisition of that new business or a merger. And so what philosophers and educators have said about ethics is that we need to have a more balanced approach. And so on the one hand, relativism is just much like a puzzle, all right? It's when you really need to try to, it's a constant negotiation of the different cultures. And then on the other hand, ethnocentrism is problematic because then it creates problems when dealing with people from different cultures because we tend to want to apply our standards there, okay? And so they proposed a different approach, which is called principalism. Now, principalism, it's a much newer approach. And it was introduced to the world of ethics around the 90s. And it was introduced by these two guys, I'll tell you what their names are in a short while. Oh, Childress, okay, James Childress, yep, I went bland there for a while. James Childress and Tom Pucham. And they actually studied biomedical ethics. And they said that there are four principles that we should take into consideration when we are confronted by some kind of ethical dilemma. And the first is autonomy. And this has to do with respecting the individual and recognizing that we all have agency and that the individual has free will. The second is beneficence. And beneficence really is the idea of doing good, you know? Think about doctors and the Hippocratic oath. Doctors, they took Hippocratic oath to do good, to care for their clients or patients without bias. And these guys, Childress and Pucham, they actually used a very good example, a very simple example to explain this in a book that they wrote. The book was called Principles of Biomedical Ethics. And they said that, for example, a doctor promised her son that she's going to take him to the library after work. But then as she's about to take him to the library after work, she learns that she has a patient who is ill and needs her attention. Now she's got to make a decision. She's been promising her son for some time to spend some time with him. And then now, you know, she's just about to leave work and she's got to have here is the new obligation. So she thought about it a little bit and she decided to look after her patient. Now what they're saying is that was the moral decision to make. One might say, well, she's got a child and she's got a responsibility to him, but not a moral responsibility to take him to the library. But she has a moral responsibility to her patient because she took the Hippocratic oath. And then, of course, another principle they talk about is called the non-maleficence. And this really means not, you know, we should not be evil. It's kind of the opposite of beneficence. And lastly, they spoke of justice, being fair and fair and just in the way that we confront ethical dilemmas and situations. So they propose a more balanced approach. Now, ethnocentrism is bad, very bad. Relativism is not necessarily considered bad, but relativism can be problematic if we don't apply our critical analysis when we're confronted by ethical situations. All right, I am going to stop it here, and I'll talk to you all again soon. Ciao for now.