Ethics officers!? Crikey!
I just got an email from LinkedIn and the top of the Top job picks for you list was an open position for Chief Ethics Officer. And I thought,
Ethics officers? What a cookery crock of crap!
To think that the decency of yore would come day be outsourced to a lobby-determinable “institution!”
The most reliable source of ethical duty comes from the virtuous character, something that is developed in situ by rubbing elbows with every kind of person and tasting life from every position—physical handicap, race, language, government, region, class, gender, and sexual preference. Now the conscience, which gains its principles from the lifeworld, is removed from all agents of production except for one. Moreover, these principles do not arise from experience, but are influenced not by the actual human subjects in the midst of that world, but by special interests capable of influencing them. Ability and need do not determine a corporation’s Code of Ought, the interests of “shareholders who are aware of the marketing power of looking ethical” do.
When the goal of production is maximizing output, human labor and cognition are put in the service of whatever the Taylorist efficiency calculus dictates should take place at the station that happens to be yours in the assembly process. Similarly, the purpose of the corporate spectacle is public relations and brand management. Doing good looks good, and the purpose of outsourcing that is to do just those things that maximize profit.
The conscience of a business can be engineered quite precisely by the accountants who weigh the effects of ethically significant public displays (or covert actions that are discoverable by journalists) on sales and brand image, by the marketers who know how to combine slow motion fields of waving grain with sentimental music and laughing children when playing the female voiceover about the Green Green Soul of Exxon, and by the lawyers who know how to phrase things for maximum interpretive flexibility and advantage.
This consideration, this primacy of the bottom line, is the seed crystal that sets the form of everything else inside the corporate culture, and also in the culture that supports such corporations.
This whole Truman Show—very little of what gets sustained has not been thought out. Ways of thinking and desiring are the best things for rulers to understand.