Re-visioning the Soul of Business Ethics A depth psychological perspective

by JD Sosa 

"If a person rises to a level of authority that exceeds his human virtue, all will suffer." - Guanzy, a predecessor of Confucius, 2500 years ago 

"When you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. When you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." - Gospel of Thomas 

"I begin the heuristic journey with something that has called to me from within my life experience, something to which I have associations and fleeting awareness but whose nature is largely unknown." -Moustakas (1990, p.13)

INTRODUCTION:

“Greed is good!” proclaimed Gordon Gekko, the amoral business tycoon in Wall Street, the 1987 film which explored the uncontrolled avarice of the 1980s. For many, the film was depressingly accurate. The corporate world has indeed devolved into a relativistic arena in which traditional values such as honesty and loyalty, have given way to the unbridled pursuit of power and financial gain.

Now, nearly 20 years after that movie and after witnessing the recurrent news of true-life stories of business leaders’ constant transgressions of the law, came this recent scene: The picture on the front page of The New York Times in early May of 2003 was memorable; five Enron directors with hands upraised, swearing before a Senate subcommittee that they were not responsible for the company’s collapse. Pathetic as they seemed, they were telling the truth.

According to our society’s rules, and the codes of law for ethical conduct in corporate America, those five Enron directors were not legally guilty of wrongdoing. Corporate directors or business leaders in America are not legally bound for questionable, dubious, immoral, wicked, and unethical decisions. They are only responsible, legally, if they break the codes and rules of law that govern their realm of activities. These situations leave me wondering about the inefficacy of generally accepted corporate codes in relation to ethics. I also wonder what we can do to prevent our corporate leaders from perpetuating the current trend toward ethical malfeasance.

We need a new ethic for business based first and foremost on helping individuals to be psychologically aware rather than relying upon authoritarian rules of conduct to regulate ethical behavior. The judiciary system with its body of laws has a very important role to play in society. We all hope that lawmakers will continue to effect improvements in this regard. However, we are persuaded that better corporate law in itself is not sufficient without fulfilling many other conditions. It must be realized that we have failed en route to better moral education. I believe this can be accomplished by exposing the business leader to the truth about who he is and the forces that operate within him or herself.

As someone who has traversed the hallways of the international corporate world and journeyed through the academic world of depth psychology, I became intrigued by what depth psychology can offer to help the tarnished world of business. I believe that by addressing our efforts and resources toward the psychological education of our future business leaders, we can contribute to a new ethic for business and avoid the occurrence of the type of corporate wrongdoing described in the stories above. I would like to approach the topic of business ethics from an exclusive psychological perspective. My work will be an exploration of how it is possible for people to take responsibility for what they do and feel about themselves and others instead of exclusively being responsible for trying to follow the law. 

Furthermore, this approach from the perspective of depth psychology is a supplement to and is not a substitute for, the practice of religion’s moral teachings and society’s judicial order for it revolves around a third aspect of the ethical dilemma -- the aspect between the spiritual and the material modes -- a third aspect we can call soul.

Being a psychologically ethical person, according to Hollis (2005), “begins with reading our own lives in a more reflective way, discerning the hidden motives, the old agendas, the replicate patterns, the unlived life projected onto others, and so on,” (p. 178). Being psychological means that one will need to find the new, personal myth from within. It will not be found in an external code or institution. Nor will right thinking or rational principles of conduct and behavior satisfy the soul. In fact, the greatest gift of depth psychology is in returning to us the possibility of deep dialogue with this mystery. “It is the invisible world, which informs, moves, and shapes the visible world,” (p.179)

Essentially, this work will intend to propose to business people an alternative way for becoming ethical. As far as I know, we can call it a new ethic because it has not been tried before. Its innovation comes from the fact that it will intensively borrow from the body of knowledge shaped by depth psychology during the last one hundred years.

I would work from the premise that psychology cannot divorce itself from the problems of philosophy and that human nature cannot be understood without understanding the values and moral conflicts that confront us all. I intend to convey that business ethics may focus on the human psyche honoring the self through Eros and Love rather than only Logos and Justice. As Erich Fromm (1962) asserts, “If a man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.” (Fromm, Man For Himself: Psychology of Ethics; p.7)