Ethical business and the ethical person

B ecause our nation is made up of people with different educational, social, and economic backgrounds, there are multiple sets of ideas and principles as to what is good or bad behavior. Ethics is behavior that promotes human welfare as defined in both individual and societal terms. Economists, financial managers, accountants, and executive decision makers are a small (but critically important) part of the varied types of educated people in America. Clearly, despite what economic thought says concerning the individual in his or her motivations, many other disciplines and people say that the person is much more than the "economic man." Namely, people find the economic definition unthinkable as a principle of human decency for a functionally progressive and civilized society. Does the human being pursue his own interest? The answer is yes, but that same human being also pursues multiple interests. Some of these are contradictory to the person's own interests, some are above individual interest, and some relate to the good of the society, the environment, and fellow humans. Namely, the individual will pay costs in going beyond self-interest out of duty, respect, membership, responsibility, kindness, "benevolence," or noblesse oblige. Human welfare as a concept stands for realities above and beyond the individual as the center and exclusive focus of existence. The world contains more than 5 billion humans, each pursuing individual interests. Well-being is complex, interdependent, social, and individual. To reduce the agape of the Greeks to the eros of the Epicures, or the civilized John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham to the barbaric economists Mill and Bentham, or the moral theorist Smith to Friedman, the University of Chicago Smith, is to distort the tapestry of complexity in favor of the inhuman and inherent naked barbarism of self-interest exclusively. Civilization is more than its barbaric roots. Beauty, art, architecture, music, literature, and even wars are tributes to people acting beyond themselves as individuals. Barbarism is part of l i fe--but not its entirety. Selfish greed is also a part of l i fe-but not its goal. Neither contains an inteThe individual may not be the problem; it may be the system that makes "good" people "bad. "