Ethics are guidelines, sometimes clear, often not so. And “goods”: be good, do all the good you can… All? Heavens! That’s very ambitious. Well, you can see that ethics can be extremely demanding. And practice virtue. This virtue of which I speak; it’s so important because ethics, as I have said, are not a matter of yes or no, but of nuance.
Should we be Benchmarking in Social Responsibility?
Over the years I have come to understand what an economist said more than a century ago: there are no absolute truths in the social sciences (except this, he added). Therefore, I will not say yes or no to benchmarking Social Responsibility. However, answering this question well requires us to talk at length about what […]
On the Matter of Bias in Moral Judgement
The 19th International Symposium on Ethics, Business and Society was celebrated recently at IESE. And in one of the parallel sessions we had the occasion to discuss the bias that we often have in our moral judgements. For example, it’s common practice to consider the ethical attitudes of others worse than our own. Or that when […]
What NGOs remind us: human beings come first
Our societies have long recognized the role of NGOs—the third sector—in resolving a multitude of situations. Moreover, in both developed and developing countries. But in recent years the boundaries between those three sectors seem to have faded, and the differentiating role of NGOs is at risk of disappearing. But what is the differentiating role of […]
