Business Values

I am very much of the business world, in the sense that we consider “business” to mean people who dress elegantly, board airplanes with only carry-on trolleys, and use acronyms no one around them has heard of. Although my training is scientific, I was raised by two parents who ran large, successful businesses themselves, and many of my friends and family are very nearly the textbook example of businesspeople. But I also have quite strong ethical inclinations that run counter to the no-nonsense attitude of a modern organization, meaning I can’t help but be frustrated by the amorality of modern businesses.

All businesses are owned, operated, and managed by people who, being human beings, have moral obligations toward others. Some mega-conglomerates adopt an outright offensive, openly malevolent attitude toward their customers, employees, and anyone else affected by them, maintaining a legalistic position whereby they’re only obliged to benefit their board (disguised as shareholders); such organizations mistreat people in ways that would border on self-satire if they weren’t so depressing¹. These are low-hanging fruit, however, so I’ll set them aside. Instead, I want to touch upon the ethical choices of well-meaning companies, which they mistakenly call values, since confusion here is pervasive.

I recently ran into a typical example on LinkedIn (where else?), in a post where an executive I won’t name complained that modern businesses had lost their values, then proceeded to suggest his own: excellence, teamwork, innovation, diversity. Nothing about the post suggests he was being dishonest, but if you consciously grapple with moral questions yourself during your day-to-day, the problem here is obvious—his substitute is a non sequitur. Excellence, teamwork, and innovation (we’ll come back to diversity) aren’t values at all, they’re MOs, a way to maximize profit. For instance, we can assume that when the executive I mentioned included innovation in the list, he meant products that would be technologically or conceptually advanced so that they would simply sell better, or for a higher price. Innovation here is a way to deliver the most profitable product, rather than it being an educational goal for the good of the company’s junior employees.

One could respond by saying that by innovation he meant developing those junior employees so that they’ll be more productive for the company in the future. However, if an employee is trained with his productivity being the only goal, this cannot be called a value, because values are precisely the ideas we commit to without an eye to material gain. Innovation as a value would mean training employees to develop, and to come up with, the most unexpected and exotic ideas, period. Money could only be a secondary concern in that scenario.

Teamwork and excellence are much the same as innovation in this respect. If innovation asks: “How can we develop the most profitable product?” then teamwork and excellence simply ask: “How can we employ our people in the way that’s the most profitable for us?” Innovation, teamwork, and excellence all ask about value for the business, rather than about the values of the business.

We are left with diversity. This is a fraught topic, and my answer here isn’t as clear-cut. First, I believe that nowadays any company that proclaims diversity one of its guiding values warrants some suspicion. Companies have been known to roll back their DEI policies, reintroduce them, then scrap them again according to marketing needs and whoever happened to be residing in the White House. Second, diversity hires necessarily mean hiring someone who is less qualified over someone who is more so. If we trust that a candidate obtained their qualifications fairly, refusing to hire them in order to fill a diversity quota (itself a grotesque term) means harming them for a reason that is certainly contestable, if not questionable. On the flip side, if one assumes minorities need preferential treatment to be hired for a position for which they would otherwise be rejected, then that is a sign of a patronizing and condescending attitude toward them. However, if a business is earnest in its attempts to promote minorities, and if in addition its executives honestly believe that diversity hires are ethical despite their implications, I concede this is a value in the moral sense of the word.

So far, I have discussed things that look like values in the moral sense of the word, but in fact aren’t that at all, while conceding that diversity could be such a value in the right circumstances. I have tried to come up with more defensible examples of values instructing business behavior, but I’m honestly stumped². AI companies have recently suggested we put some vaguely defined brakes on AI development, but their argument is that we should do this to stop AI from ending humanity³. “Don’t wipe humanity off the face of the earth” is a very low ethical bar to clear. In my own personal experience getting a PhD in biology, I can say that scientists who research subjects with clear ethical implications (like genetic engineering in people) will often mention these problems, but will never expound them, let alone allow such considerations to figure into their research.

Say tomorrow a company finds a practical way to cure Down’s Syndrome in the womb, should we even let it? How much should the treatment be commercialized, and who should bear most of the cost? What bothers me most deeply when I ask myself such questions isn’t so much that a modern business’s default mode is amoral, as that we got to a point where an amoral attitude isn’t only taken for granted but is apparently acceptable and even desirable. I have attended many lectures, conferences, business meetings, and the like during my life. The people in these gatherings profoundly understand their field and mutually enrich each other to advance it. Even if the situation demands that we wear a sort of mask to enter, we still take our human responsibilities with us into meeting rooms and conference halls.

Footnotes

1. The Guardian, 11 March 2021 ↩

2. If you can think of any, please send me a message. ↩

3. The Guardian, 14 September 2026 ↩