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| Financial crisis not just about greed, says ethicist | This Easter weekend various Christian leaders have expressed the view that the global economic crisis will result in many people rediscovering religious faith.
Others believe the global recession coupled with the G20 blueprint will mark a significant change in the way corporate business is conducted.
Simon Longstaff, the executive director of St James Ethics Centre, has written extensively on corporate greed.
He believes the genesis of the global financial crisis did not simply come down to greed and excess, but to a failure of ethics.
"I think the bigger story in this is although some people would attempt at the beginning of their analysis of these events to say that what was to blame was the failure of regulation, in fact the better interpretation, I think, is to say there was a failure of ethics, full stop," he said.
"Part of it's to do with greed. Now, there's no doubt about it. Part of it is to do with a failure to properly understand the kind of obligations that attach to various organs within the market system, and I'll give you one example, that is the ratings agencies.
"And some of it was just blindness. It wasn't greed, it wasn't dishonesty, it wasn't a failure to understand, it was just a kind of conditioned blindness where people were doing things because that's the way it was always done.
"All of those things are a failure of ethics."
However, he says greed has played a significant part in some of the problems corporations are facing.
"It's in the case of executive remuneration structures, which are based on the assumption that you cannot rely on people to work hard for the company simply because they promised to do so or because they have a commitment to the excellence of their own craft," he said.
"Rather you have to create a remuneration system which assumes they will only do that if in effect you bribe them.
"So there's a model of human nature sitting inside the system, which I think is the elephant in the room, which says, 'we don't believe in honour, we don't believe in promises, we don't believe in any of these things.'"
"[That] is just one dimension, a narrow form of self-interest which will drive people's behaviour. Now to the extent that you do that, you do embed what might best be described as an orientation towards the greedy." | | 2009-04-11 06:40:49 |
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