MORALS by Howard Gardner

“We live in a time of intense pressure on individuals and organizations to cut corners, pursue their own interests, and forget about the effect of their behavior on others.

Additionally, many businesspeople have internalized Milton Friedman’s belief that if we let people pursue their interests and allow the processes of the marketplace to operate freely, positive moral and ethical consequences will magically follow. I am not one to question the power and benefits of the marketplace in any absolute sense.

But markets are amoral; the line between shading earnings and committing outright fraud is not always clear. The chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, said it well:

‘When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.’

Confidence in business is undermined; individuals distrust one another.”