Blessay: Personal Ethics and Corporate Morals — My Choices

I am not a great mor­al­ist or philo­sopher, so don’t expect much intel­li­gence here. But here are some mus­ings on how I cope with pro­fes­sional exist­ence and mor­al­ity. These thoughts I have pondered on over the last five or so years and con­tinue to won­der if I have got­ten it right.

Definitions

So I did some research but ended up with Wikipedia to get some definitions.

Definition: Ethics — encom­passing right con­duct and good life.

Definition: Morality means a code of con­duct held to be author­it­at­ive in mat­ters of right and wrong. Morals are cre­ated by and define soci­ety, philo­sophy, reli­gion, or indi­vidual conscience.

At first, eth­ics and mor­als look like the same thing. They are cer­tainly very closely related, and in a per­fect world, they might even be same. After some thought, I have come to the view that mor­als is a code of con­duct that comes from out­side your­self. Thus, Paganism, Islam, Christianity or Buddhism((insert your choice here if not lis­ted)) offers a moral code that you adopt, for your­self, to guide your actions. In this con­text, organ­ised reli­gions offer a com­mun­ally enlightened, con­sen­sual code that offers sound premises for ‘right liv­ing’. Of course, organ­ised reli­gions are not the only codes for ‘right liv­ing’, many people instinct­ively under­stand the right thing and are mor­ally strong enough to assert them­selves, are recog­nised as ‘good people’ by their peers.

I define eth­ics as what you actu­ally do, the deliv­er­able, the action. Thus a moral code that says ‘love your neigh­bour’ does not give you much prac­tical advice on how to turn that into a deliv­er­able. Ethics is how you choose to act in a given situ­ation using the moral code of your choice.

Examples of eth­ical actions might be:

1. to choose to buy fair trade goods to sup­port your fel­low man instead of the cheapest goods which are likely to made by exploited people.
2. To sup­port char­ity with time and money to help other people
3. To be respect­ful of other people means not call­ing someone an idiot in a meeting.
4. Support your man­ager, even though you may not agree with their approach or point of view because that is the best action for the entire team.

and so on.

Enough Personal Stuff, where the Network angle

I try hard to be an eth­ical per­son, and to do the right thing. I judge the right thing by my standards.

As a freel­ance net­work engin­eer, I have to work for Business. When work­ing in busi­ness, it has its own moral code and I am expec­ted to accept and hon­our that code. Therefore I act by the code¹ and thus get the job done.

Therefore, being part of a change pro­cess or pro­ject² that will make hun­dreds of people redund­ant and have a huge impact on their lives is a dif­fi­cult eth­ical prob­lem for me per­son­ally, but per­fectly accept­able by busi­ness mor­als. Indeed, if the com­pany doesn’t do it, other com­pan­ies will and per­haps my com­pany would fail and no one would have a job. But enough with the philo­soph­ical dilemmas.

Now the prob­lem here, is that the moral code can change accord­ing to where I am work­ing. But my per­sonal eth­ical code doesn’t really change much.

I have no mor­als, but I am ethical

So when I say to you that: “Professionally, I have no mor­als, but I am very eth­ical” here is what I mean:

I adopt the mor­als of the oper­a­tional envir­on­ment around me. That means if the com­pany says “use Juniper NetScreen” I go, “no prob­lem”. If they say thou shalt love the Foundry switches, I choke a bit and say “if you really want me to”. If the Corporate pro­cess requires me to wait ten weeks for a pur­chase order to be pro­cessed and waste sub­stan­tial amounts of money, then I bow my head and wait.

However, if I am ever asked to per­form an action that is fun­da­ment­ally wrong, am I will­ing to speak out ? Yes I am. I have done and will do so again.

Have you taken the time to think about your eth­ical choices as a professional ?

Footnotes

1. at least, as I under­stand the code, it does vary from com­pany to com­pany [back]
2. like installing a new com­puter sys­tem that is faster [back]

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