Is the phrase “moral business” and oxymoron (a self-contradicting phrase)?

The purpose of business is to make money. Morality is all about doing the right thing without regard to profit. I see a fundamental incompatibility here. How can you do the right thing regardless of profit, if what you really need to do is to make money and maximize profit?

There are lots of guidelines etc. about this conflict of course; they mostly talk about accounting standards, transparency and customer relations.

The law represents the lowest common denominator of moral standards. Conformance to the law is a very minimalistic measure of moral behavior. In some places there is not even conformance to the law, or worse, only selective conformance—use it when it suits my purpose, ignore it if it doesn’t.

Given the above then capitalism—the pursuit of profit encourages and almost requires immoral business behavior, and yet capitalism seems to be the economic model of choice worldwide. To my observation the situation is getting worse. I wrote about consumer protection a couple of weeks ago; well nobody really cares to follow consumer protection laws very much these days, unless the standards of behavior required by them are strictly enforced and legal sanctions made to work.

In the international construction business, it used to be the case that you would spend a lot of time agreeing to a very comprehensive and detailed contract with wording to cover as many eventualities as it possibly could, sign it, start work and then hopefully put the contract away in a bottom drawer and never refer to it again. Although I’m now a bit out of touch with that business sector, I get the impression that while the contract does still mostly live in the drawer, it comes out of there now quite often so that people can ensure that the terms are being complied with.

There is becoming a much greater reliance on the written word in the contract [or the law] than any overarching commonly accepted moral behavior in relationships. Banks have relied on this method of doing business for years and in many ways it has served them well, reputational and relationship considerations don’t count for anything in that area and it looks like that approach is spreading, even despite the fall from grace of the banking and financial sector.

Advertising methods can be labeled immoral when they represent things which are either not wholly true, where what they promise is subject to hidden conditions, or when they are designed to deliberately entice people to spend beyond their means.

The quest for money shoves moral behavior well into the background. Pity really that behaviors are so dictated by legalities rather than by the desire to “do the right thing.” But again looking at safety at work and environmental matters, these also seem to have achieved considerable success in their implementation and rise to power and influence through the enactment and enforcement of laws and regulations, not so much because people are really tree huggers at heart, or worry too much about people riding in the back of pick up trucks, but because the rules say that they should be, and woe betide you if you don’t follow them.

So we are compelled by fear of punishment to follow laws, many of which are against people’s self-interest, and which because they are against certain self-interest spawn further legal work [if you can afford it] in trying to find ways to avoid them or their consequences. In today’s capitalist business world, it is a competitive disadvantage to try to act in a virtuous way, you’ll just get screwed.

The Philippines and the USA are some way ahead of much of the rest of the world in defining behaviors and relationships in terms of laws and regulations. It seems to be a successful method judged by the performance of much of the world’s business activity, you can even cite Microsoft’s putting some kind of bugs into the Xbox Live system to find out who may be using an Xbox modified to take pirated software, and then expelling the subscriber from the Xbox Live service if the machine is found to have been modified, I guess it worked. Legal sanctions are a heavy handed way of defining relationships, good for the lawyers perhaps, bad for the courts because they get quickly full, and because they get quickly full it takes a long time to bring cases. and because of that the attractiveness of legal remedies falls into disrepute. One of the main reasons for the poorly rated Philippines business investment environment is the time it takes to obtain court settlements. So in the end, a reliance on legal remedies becomes self-defeating as court time is taken up by those who use legal remedies purely for their own selfish ends.

Mike can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.