Where do ethics come from?

Ethical principles that hold firm and pass across generations and centuries derive from people who 'contribute to the conversation' truths about two types of reality:

  • what is

and

  • what should be.


If you don't know where your ethics come from, then what makes you think you will be ethically correct and consistent when you face an ethical challenge?

Ethics derive from the social relationships we have... at the level of the society that we live in, not just at the level of our own friends, neighborhood, family, or business.

From where do you think morality derives?

What ethical principles should guide people who run a healthcare business?

First, healthcare business administrators/managers should be transparent with their stakeholders about the ultimate/fundamental goal of their business.


There are four general options for defining what the fundamental purpose of a business is.


Which of these four options do you dial into?

01

Earn profit for the owners

I and many other people (like Peter Drucker) have developed arguments for why this cannot be the most correct option.

02

Create and retain customers

This was Drucker's perspective. 


To do this, the business must provide those customers with value.

03

Create value 'in general'

OK...  but why not define for whom the business wants to create value? 

04

Create value for certain stakeholders

Choosing worthy stakeholders (including employees) for whom to create value can make a business heroic.

Second, they should behave within the boundaries of

four types of ethical systems.

     01

prescriptive (cognitive/conscious)

ethics



  • consequential ethics... Learn more about John Stuart Mill!
03

economic

ethics 


  • Adam Smith:
  • gave the first argument for creating a liberal capitalist economy (i.e., he invented it).
  • did not separate 'the economy' from 'the society.'
  • kept societal good as the top concern for his economic vision. 


  • US Federal Reserve board members and policy makers still use Smith's ideas.


  • The Myth about Smith:  Many people claim falsely that:
  • (in general) independently functioning businesspersons' actions will improve the overall domestic economy simply based on their motive to maximize profits (via the "invisible hand")

          and

  • Smith himself presented evidence for that claim. 

         

        They should instead:


  • John Maynard Keynes and other society-focused capitalists have kept Smith's social-based capitalism alive in modern Western economies as these economies change with time.


  • If Milton Friedman's overall view is correct, why do almost no countries allow its use in isolation to run their national economic policy?
02

behavioral

(subconscious)

ethics

  • Animals make decisions at subconscious levels, not just at conscious levels. 



  • An example of bounded ethicality would be a healthcare business manager telling a healthcare professional whether or not / how to follow that healthcare professional's professional society's standards of practice but not allowing the healthcare professional to tell the healthcare manager whether or not / how to follow the healthcare manager's professional society's standards of practice.

     04

corporate social responsibility (CSR)

  • Formalized as a theory in the 1950s, CSR in the 1970s became the term that business professionals began using to refer to business ethics and the relationships between their society, their business, and themselves.


  • Research shows (and will continue to show more about) how and where CSR does (and does not) help businesses.