The Latest Industry To Flounder:  Ethics Inc.

More than 80% of major corporations have ethics codes. Where there are ethics codes there are business ethicists. But where are these business ethicists when you need them?

Since the 1950s, Americans have developed a veritable fetish for expert opinion. Sex, grief, marriage, mediation, you name the problem and there is a lifestyle engineer to help you fix it.

Around 30 years ago, a new breed of expert loomed up. After a whistle-blowing article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the medical establishment decided to invite philosophers and theologians to the bedside to monitor the moral practices of physicians and medical researchers. Like most species of expert, biomedical ethicists have been fruitful and multiplied, both in terms of sheer numbers and weight of influence. The ethics experts quickly spread from the hospital to Wall Street.

During the 1980s, public trust in the corporate establishment was shaken by the Milken scandal and the like. Businesses began hiring ethicists to help restore public confidence in their integrity. It was soon discovered that companies with ethics codes and programs received fewer punitive judgments in court than companies without ethicists. This gave a fillip to the business of business ethics. On last report, the business ethics industry was running at a ruddy $2 billion a year.

Business ethicists do things like compose ethics codes, run ethics workshops and retreats, do ethics audits, and set up lines of communication for whistle blowers. Today most major corporations have ethics officers and many consulting firms such as Arthur Andersen offer, or rather, offered, ethics consultations for a fee.

But, I repeat, where are the ethics experts when you need them? Almost every pundit in the country has pontificated on the breach of trust in the corporate world but, strangely enough, hardly a peep has been heard from the business ethicists. More importantly, why weren't the maestros of morality able to help avert the current moral debacle? Why weren't the ethics auditors on Wall Street able to sniff out the rather obvious fact that there was something morally amiss with the way relationships were developing between auditors and audited?

I trust the ethics specialists at, for example, WorldCom were out of the loop, but then what good does it do to hire experts to act as the company's conscience and then keep them in the dark about the company's inner workings? If it was the business of some ethicist to keep moral tabs, why wasn't he pressing the kinds of questions that would have defused the shenanigans of the money mongers? Perhaps because ethics officers are not inclined to ask questions and make demands that will get them canned. Perhaps because, as Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds have argued in "The Appearance of Impropriety," the army of ethics doyens is simply a public relations ploy. Even within the guild, there is a sense that many ethics consultants are in the business of peddling Hollywood stage fronts.

But disingenuousness apart, the growing fantasy that ethics is just another area of expertise, and that we can subcontract the work of moral reflection, is a parlous one.

First, there are simply no grounds for believing that a person can become an authority on matters moral in the same way that he might on market strategies; that is, by mastering the appropriate information and literature. You can memorize Kant and still be a moral dunce. As Aristotle taught us, moral percipience and judgment are not the product of reading moral treatises and applying them to case histories. Aristotle counsels that if you need moral guidance seek out a person who has succeeded in living a moral life rather than someone who has succeeded in memorizing moral arguments.

More important than the lack of philosophical foundation, the idea of ethics experts invites us to believe that the ethical implications of what I am doing are not my business but rather the business of the ethics office down the hall. After all, if there are experts on ethics, then who am I, a non-expert, to pass moral judgments?

Be they ethics audits, codes or "ethics fitness seminars," none of the numinous pseudo-products of the ethics industry will restore integrity to commerce. The issues that provoked the present crisis were not overly subtle. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and CEOs do not need a business ethicist to tell them right from wrong. What they need is the character to do the right thing, which is to say, the mettle to avoid the temptation to talk themselves out of their knowledge of right and wrong even if that knowledge lowers their profit margins.

Mr. Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.

Updated July 30, 2002