Six Unavoidable Ethical Dilemmas Every Professional Faces

• Author: Kirk O. Hanson
• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12045

Six Unavoidable Ethical

Dilemmas Every

Professional Faces

KIRK O. HANSON

Good afternoon. I am honored to be selected as this year’s

Verizon Professor of Business Ethics and to be invited to

speak to you. I am particularly glad to be able to

acknowledge my long-standing friendship with Michael Hoffman,

one of the true pioneers in the field of business ethics. I was here

in 1977 for the first Bentley Conference on Business Ethics.

Bentley and Michael Hoffman have contributed greatly to the field

over the past 40 years.

Last year, the Verizon Visiting Professor was another pioneer in

business ethics, Kenneth Goodpaster of the University of St.

Thomas, who gave a compelling evaluation of the history of corpo-

rate responsibility, concluding that “the future of the corporation is

tethered to the future of responsible management.”1He concluded

that for business to thrive, responsible management must be

present and that business managers had done a pretty good job

meeting the standard of responsible management over the past 50

years. I am not so sure, and this will be the first theme I develop.

I will have three themes in this lecture. As I indicated, I will give

you my own evaluation of the successes and failures of efforts to

promote business ethics over the last 50 years. My conclusion will

be that we have not been very successful and that in the end, only

the convictions and efforts of individual managers and corporate

leaders give us any chance to write a better story. Second, to that

Kirk O. Hanson is Executive Director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and John

Courtney Murray, S.J. University Professor of Social Ethics at Santa Clara University, Santa

Clara, CA. E-mail: kohanson@scu.edu.

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end, I will describe the challenges each of us faces personally in

living a life of integrity in our modern institutions, whether in a

corporation or other professional context, such as in law, consult-

ing, finance, counseling, or in academia. Third, I will urge you and

all of us to act with integrity in addressing the six unavoidable

ethical dilemmas every professional faces. I believe these dilem-

mas are indeed unavoidable—that they are built into our decision

to become a business person or other professional. And I believe

they are mirrored by a set of parallel unavoidable ethical dilem-

mas in the roles we play in our private lives as a husband or wife,

parent, son or daughter, volunteer, or neighbor.

But my first theme is our lack of success in integrating ethics

into corporate management and business institutions. I have

taught business ethics for 43 years; my first full class was here

in Boston at Northeastern University, and I continued with it for

23 years at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business,

and the last 13 years at Santa Clara University. I wish I could

report that the teaching and work that I and others in the field

have done had led to a virtuous revolution in business behavior.

It has not. By some measures and accounts, business behavior

today is worse than it was in the early 1970s when we began

the development of the field of academic business ethics,

and worse than it was in the mid-1980s when the deliberate

corporate management of ethics and compliance began in

earnest.2

Let’s face it, the ground has changed dramatically under all of

us. When we began thinking about the ethical behavior of busi-

ness in the 1960s, our primary concerns were product safety (e.g.,

regarding the Chevrolet Corvair and later the Ford Pinto), envi-

ronmental damage (New York’s Love Canal toxic site and our

increased awareness of air and water pollution), and the plight of

the so-called “hard core unemployed,” following the urban riots of

1965 and 1967. Business ethics advocates and others urged the

“business statesmen” of that era (individuals such as David Rock-

efeller of Chase Manhattan, Reginald Jones of General Electric,

Walter Haas, Jr. of Levi Strauss, Joe Wilson and Peter McCullough

of Xerox, and Frank Cary of IBM) to address these questions of

business behavior.3Later, starting around 1970, business ethics

advocates focused also on equal opportunity for women and for all

minorities in business.

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