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“Trust your feelings.”

This phrase perfectly expresses the philosophy of many Americans, even those not named Luke. You’d have thought Jar Jar Binks would have discredited all things Star Wars, but apparently not.

So if you trust your feelings, consult them and figure out the right thing to do. It’s a time of weak profitability for your company and you have to choose between two individuals. Steven is a marginal performer but a great guy. If you fire him, his chances of finding another job are dismal.

Wendy is a superb producer, but is evil. She gets along with her co-workers, but she yells at her kids, kicks stray puppies, and talks to friends on her cell phone in the movie theater.

Who do you fire — Steven or Wendy? Most of us run meritocracies and would keep Wendy. But what makes meritocracy right?

Nothing, that’s what. Meritocracies are efficient, but efficiency doesn’t measure right and wrong.

Corporations (or at least publicly held corporations, where the owners don’t run the company) are amoral entities. That’s amoral, not immoral, by the way. To be immoral you have to subscribe to a moral code and then violate it. The sole corporate standards of behavior are the maximization of shareholder value and the legal and regulatory frameworks within which the corporation must operate. None of these are moral propositions.

You’re a moral agent working for an amoral one. As we asked last week, what are your moral obligations?

One school of thought says that as an employee and a leader, you’ve signed an implied contract. The company pays you; the right thing to do is to act in its best interests. So long as the company doesn’t ask you to break the law, this obligation takes precedence over how you’d act on your own. You fire Steven and promote Wendy.

Another school of thought insists that you obey your own moral compass at all times. “I was just obeying orders,” isn’t, after all, a compelling defense. Promoting demon spawn from Hell just isn’t a choice you can live with, nor is putting a perfectly nice guy on the street when you can prevent it. Steven stays and you squash Wendy like a bug to keep her from ruining any more movies.

Neither the follow-your-own-moral-code-at-all-times perspective nor the act-as-your-company’s-agent viewpoint provides perfect guidance. When it comes to morality, context is everything. While it would be lovely if you could choose just one of these perspectives and go with it, you can’t. They’re both perfectly valid. You have to balance them against each other.

Under most circumstances your employer’s decision (so long as it’s legal) should supercede your own preferences. The alternative is a my-way-or-the-highway attitude which accepts no ambiguity, nor the possibility that someone else might have a valid point of view. If everyone acted this way, no company could exist for more than about a week, because every time the company made a decision with moral overtones, it would lose every employee who disagreed with it.

You can’t, on the other hand, always defer to the company’s judgment: What’s best for the corporation, while legal (or at least winnable in court, which is indistinguishable from legality) can be just too disgusting to be a party to.

As a corporate leader you face few clear-cut choices. Is it any wonder that, faced with this level of ambiguity, so many leaders shrug and just do what’s best for themselves? Looking out for yourself isn’t immoral. In fact, our entire economic system assumes you’ll do exactly that. While it isn’t what you’d call an ethical code, it is a social imperative. Your employer certainly won’t do it for you. It’s looking out for its shareholders. If you don’t protect yourself, you’re unprotected.

Assessing your moral obligations when you’re acting as your employer’s agent, isn’t a matter of simple, clear-cut choices, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Ethics is a complicated discipline.

If you think trusting your feelings does the job, here’s a question to ponder: Socrates was a very bright guy and spent his life pondering the subject. He was neither the first nor the last very bright person to do so over the past several millennia.

If ethics is so simple, what do you think they’ve been pondering about?

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

In 1886, Santa Clara County sued the Southern Pacific Railroad regarding a tax matter. The case escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court where, in a mystifying aside, Chief Justice Waite commented, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

More than a century later we continue to suffer from the consequences of this tangential assertion that corporations are, for most legal purposes, people.

A recent Survival Guide, in a discussion of the morality of contracting with offshore providers for IT services, asserted that corporations aren’t moral agents. Quite a few readers disagreed, arguing that because corporations are composed of human beings, they inherit the morality of the individual human beings who own them and are employed by them.

If only it were that simple. But it isn’t. Human beings are composed of cells, tissues and organs. Presumably we each have greater moral responsibilities than our spleens. More generally, organisms have “emergent properties” — characteristics beyond those of their component parts.

Morality is a species-specific trait of Homo sapiens. As a former graduate student in ethology — the study of animal behavior — I can tell you with authority that there isn’t a shred of scientific evidence to suggest that any other species has a moral sense.

Organizations of human beings aren’t just big people. They’re different organisms, with different behavioral drivers. In a sense, they exist in a state of nature, subject only to criminal, civil, and evolutionary laws. The human decision-makers who make decisions on behalf of corporations might be moral beings (although I sometimes have my doubts) but group decisions and decision-making processes are quite different from those of individuals. We’ve seen this time and again in the form of mob behavior, and in the reprehensible behavior of some nations that’s at odds with the fundamental decency of most of their citizens, to give just two examples.

This, in fact, is the fundamental flaw in the Supreme Court decision: Human beings are presumptively moral beings; corporations are presumptively amoral. Our nation’s founders recognized the distinction: According to them the rights of human beings precede and legitimize government, while by definition, the government provides the legal framework that allows corporations to exist.

The rights of human beings precede government; the rights of corporations are defined by it.

Life sure would be easier if businesses operated as moral agents. It would be a refreshing change. But they don’t.

Which brings us to you and your role as a corporate leader. In that role, where you’re acting as the agent of an amoral entity, your moral choices aren’t easily summarized in black-and-white terms. It’s a subject next week’s column will explore in more practical terms.

Moral absolutism has become fashionable these days. It’s common to hear people assert that we all know what’s right and wrong, without question, beyond doubt, and don’t even think about arguing. That’s for moral relativists — muddled thinkers who allow evil to spread because they lack the courage and integrity to fight it. The moral absolutists know better — they can tell right from wrong and good from evil instantly and clearly. They know it in their guts.

Maybe they think our spleens do have a moral sense.

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