[MUSIC] Welcome to the present session of our course on unethical decision making in organizations. Our course is focused on unethical behavior that results from ethical blindness. This concept describes situations in which decision makers are not aware of the ethical dimensions of their decision because they are embedded in an overwhelmingly strong context. We have, at the very beginning of the course, argued that unconscious, unethical behavior is not the only type of unethical behavior. In many situations, actors are well aware of the fact that their behavior is wrong. In this session, you will learn what types of unethical behavior exist, how these types are related to each other. What moral disengagement is and how it can lead to unethical behavior and eventually also to ethical blindness. And you will learn how an ethical dilemma may develop over time such that it may result in ethical blindness, and hence, possibly also in unethical behavior. >> In our course we have adopted a rather descriptive take on unethical behavior and on ethical blindness. We argued that actors are ethically blind if they violate their own values, rules, and principles, often in strong situations. When people are ethically blind, nonethical aspects of their decisions may overpower and overshadow ethical ones. Most importantly, because of the strong situation, people do not see that what they do is wrong. In a more normative sense, we have in the first week shown you the toolbox of philosophers who try to evaluate ethical or unethical behavior. From a more general perspective and independent from particular decision makers individual ethical standpoint. As you might recall, according to Immanuel Kant, a decision has to run through the universalizability test. Can I wish that my rule becomes the rule for everyone? If not, I shouldn't do it. According to Jeremy Bentham from a utilitarian perspective, the right behavior is the one that aims at achieving the greatest utility for the greatest number of people. The common denominator of both approaches is that you care about others, and actually, you even care for others. How you care about or for others provides for us the roadmap for this session. Specifically, we will propose the following types of unethical behavior. You care about others in a negative sense. That is, you want to harm them intentionally. You do not care at all about them, and any harm-doing is just a by-product. Or you do care about them, but still do some harm despite of your good intentions. In our course, we have adopted a rather descriptive take on unethical behavior and on ethical blindness. We argue that actors are ethically blind if they violate their own values, rules and principles, often in a strong situation. When people are ethically blind, non-ethical aspects of the decision making overpower and overshadow ethical ones. Most importantly, because of the strong situation, people do not see that what they do is wrong. In a normative sense, we have in the first week shown you the toolbox of philosophers who tried to evaluate ethical or unethical behavior from a general perspective and independent from a particular decision-maker's ethical standpoint. >> Let us start by looking at the first type. When someone breaks the rules, we often assume automatically that the harm that has been caused by such a rule breaking was intended. In extreme cases, we may even have the impression that some individuals derive pleasure from harming others. Often those people are psychopaths. Psychopathy is a clinical phenomenon that describes a personality disorder, which manifests in antisocial behavior of people who lack the ability to imagine themselves in the shoes of someone who suffers from the consequences of their behavior. Psychopaths also lack the remorse that might prevent them from repeating such behavior. The psychiatrist Robert Hare has developed a psychological assessment tool to measure whether or not an individual is a psychopath. The protagonists of some of the corporate scandals which we have discussed in our course, such as Jeff Skilling from Enron, have been labeled in the mass media discussion, corporate psychopath. While we must be careful with using personality disorder labels from a distance when evaluating managers in organizations. We have already highlighted in our session on the impact of fear, that aggressive antisocial behavior might be a wide-spread phenomenon in organizations. There might also be good reasons to assume that modern corporations promote such behavior by role-modelling aggressiveness as a key element of a successful career path. We may be able to understand such attempts to do harm to others intentionally. Maybe such psychopaths have not received enough love or attention, and now they might want to let some innocent people suffer, so that they are not alone. Or they want to demonstrate to themselves or others that they have power. There are also reliable insights from neuroscience about the potential for antisocial behavior being hotwired in some people's brains. Whatever the explanation might be, there is no doubt that the way a psychopath treats others is morally wrong, regardless of the psychological reasons behind such behavior. Psychology is not excusology, as Phillips and Bartels has highlighted. >> Another variant of intentional unethical behavior is revenge. Paradoxically, someone who is taking a revenge might be driven by motives that he or she perceives as highly ethical, namely fairness and justice. This phenomenon exists in societies with deep seated histories of injustice, or with traditional forms of social interaction where clans and families fight revenge games sometimes over centuries. More interesting for us, it also exists in organizations. Unethical behavior motivated by perceived injustice is not motivated by greed and the pleasure to hurt others. In his study, Stealing in the Name of Justice, the psychologist Gerald Greenberg showed that people who feel treated unfairly might look for revenge while having the feeling of being morally entitled to do so. People might, for instance, steal or sabotage or even harass others in their respective organizational context because they feel treated unfairly. Such behavior is widespread in organizations. In the case of revenge, it is even easier to understand why someone wants to hurt someone else intentionally. Remember, it is a justice motive that is underlying the desire to take revenge. And who of us does not want to be just? One may in addition even argue that such practices, if established in some cultures, ensure that people think twice before they, say, kill someone else. They may in fact not dare to do this if they anticipate the mindset of the relatives of their potential victims. But again, in modern societies, we do not consider self justice to be right. And there are also good reasons why it is abolished and even punished. Actions driven by self justice are more error prone than those endorsed by neutral institutions. These actions more often affect innocence and easily lead to viscous circles. >> This was our first category, harming others intentionally, and maybe even deriving pleasure or satisfaction from it. The category we want to present next is ubiquitous. Very often, unethical decisions are a kind of collateral damage. We harm others as a side effect of pursuing own interests. Ideally, we do care about others. No question about this. But we also care about ourselves. After all, we are the center of our world. This is true for every one of us. We are the center of the world surrounding us, and the center is a very privileged place, isn't it? As long as it doesn't cost us anything, it is easy to care about others and to be nice. One may, and in particular many economists do, argue that being nice to others is also in our own interest. Simply because it will increase the chance that those others will also be nice to us. So being nice has advantages. And even paying some costs here can be conceived as a good investment. This week, we have discussed how ideology reinforces ethical blindness. And we have zoomed into one particular ideology which has shaped the education at business schools around the world. Shareholder value maximization. Greed has been turned into a value. Because one of the basic assumptions of the capitalist ideology is that this is how we are as human beings, homo economicus. We maximize our own utility, or as organizations, our profit. And in turn, free markets transform this egoism into welfare for everyone. Equipped with such narrative, we might focus on our own interest, and develop a significant tolerance for the collateral damages it creates. As the CEO of Goldman Sachs stated when his company was criticized during the financial crisis of 2008, I'm doing God's work. Unethical behavior thus might result, not from bad intentions, not from the failed need to balance things. But from a deeply seated conviction that it is the best to focus on self-interests even when there are side effects. So far, we have discussed two types of unethical behavior. The first type, people want to harm others intentionally. And in the second, they do not care about them at all, and any harm doing is just a side effect. In the next video, we will discuss the third type where people do care about others, want to do good, but still behave unethically. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]
