Jonathan Keir’s research while affiliated with Peking University and other places

The Confucian tradition, which places the virtue of ren or fellow feeling at its heart as a ‘gateway’ to the more concrete virtues of common Western parlance, offers a potential antidote to the excesses of a Western business ethics which, even after its recent academic reembrace of the Aristotelian tradition, in practice still too often instrumentalises virtue in the service of a ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ constraining of the profit motive. The deeper, intrinsic ‘ethos’ promised by a Confucian approach also finds its echo in the West in the work of Hans Küng’s Weltethos (World Ethos) project, led today on the business ethics front by Klaus Leisinger and Claus Dierksmeier. This paper explores a dilemma at the heart of the World Ethos movement seen from the twin peaks of the World Ethics Institute at Peking University and the Weltethos Institut at the University of Tübingen: namely, whether a business ethics culture accustomed to thinking in terms of CSR-esque lists of corporate values, virtues or principles can best be reformed via documents like the UN Global Compact, the 2010 Global Economic Ethic Manifesto, or even the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or whether a more radical, revolutionary quest for an inner ‘ethos’, to be lived and experienced by self-cultivating individuals engaged in business all over the world regardless of background, ought somehow to be undertaken parallel to these endeavours. The authors outline possible steps towards such a transformation of the management community’s understanding of virtue, without, however, dismissing the contribution of traditional, dilemma-oriented Western thinking about applied ethics in general, and business ethics in particular.

Humanistic reform of management theory and practice could be expected to take a plurality of guises. One such manifestation of the desire for a humanistic reorientation of management discourse is the Weltethos Institut at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The Institute’s work builds on the legacy of founder Hans Küng in the sphere of interreligious and intercultural dialogue, and seeks to apply the humanistic insights learnt there to the world of organisations. For Küng, the ‘World Ethos’ (Weltethos) is a discovery, less of a common letter than of a common spirit among the world’s major and minor spiritual and cultural traditions, which he summarises as ‘Basic Trust in life and reality’ (in German Grundvertrauen or Lebensvertrauen), a yes-saying disposition of love for life ‘despite all temptations to reject it’. Without such a basic disposition, Küng argues, ‘no one can behave ethically’. This paper explores the paradox at the heart of the ‘World Ethos’ idea as it applies to questions of organisational leadership and management: if a certain spirit of Grundvertrauen among employees is indeed a feature of successful organisations, the attempt to cultivate it directly in the name of increased efficiency or profit is a potentially sinister and counter-productive enterprise. A more truly humanistic approach to organisational management might ease up on the top-down ‘love and trust’ message and instead provide a platform on which all members of an organisation feel free to reveal their ‘whole selves’ and explore their own spiritual sources—and those of colleagues—in a critical but ultimately trusting and constructive climate.

It is drearily fashionable to criticise the business community for its chronic refusal to take values - beyond the bottom line - seriously. A more honest investigation of the phenomenon of moral bankruptcy in global business and finance, however, reveals that a prior crisis among humanists - widespread denial of the very existence and even desirablility of universal values - predates the financial crises and big business scandals of recent decades, and deserves a healthy portion of the blame for them. Opposition to this quest for common values takes many forms, principled as well as practical. Values, it is commonly argued, belong in the realm of individual freedom; organisations, including corporations, have no business trying to impose moral preferences on their employees. The only solution fit for the 21st Century, with its highly differentiated and increasingly global labour markets, is, on the standard neoliberal account, to leave individuals alone to pursue their own conceptions of the good life on the condition that they display a minimum of respect for the rule of law within the organisations in which they operate. Such ethical minimalism, however, leaves a society more or less defenceless against the excesses of its most powerful actors, which today most certainly include multinational corporations. Without demanding higher, global standards of ethical responsibility beyond mimimum legal compliance, a ‘race to the bottom’ among business actors desperate for survival is, and has been, the inevitable result of this total abandonment of higher humanistic principles. The reintroduction of Basic Trust, necessary for all ethical behaviour, into the system in which global managers operate - an impossible task without turning to an updated global patrimony of humanistic learning - is the common goal of the Humanistic Management Network and the Global Ethic Project. This brief paper critically explores the paths to reform proposed by the two movements, and shows how each can play an important supporting role in helping the other to achieve its main goals.