Exploring Honorable Business Practices

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be here. My training is in philosophy. I'm a philosophy PhD, but I teach in a business school here at Wake Forest University. You might wonder why someone who teaches 18th century British moral philosophy could have found his way into a business school. It's a fair question. But as a philosopher, one of the things I wanted to think about is whether there can be such a thing as this, honorable business. So if you think about business activity and run through in your mind some of the most salient examples of business, chances are you're going to think of a lot of bad things that have happened. You're going to think about Bernie Madoff, or maybe you're going to think about Enron, or maybe you're going to think about various things you can get on the dark web. But one of the things I discovered in teaching students in the business school is that this is a question they get asked a lot. Why are you studying business? Now, they get asked this by their fellow students, by professors, including professors from other disciplines. Why are you studying business? And this is usually the only possible answers that they think of. Well, either to get a job or make money. Well, is it true that business students want to get a job or make money? Sure it is. That's probably also true for every other student and every other discipline as well. Still, it's not a particularly inspiring vision. Is there some way that we could think of, and again, I'm a moral philosopher, could there be some kind of moral purpose for business? Well, let me ask you to consider a comparison between two professions. Think of these two professions, medicine and business. Now, in many ways, they're very similar. So they are both professions. They have specialties and subspecialties. In both cases, they have technical knowledge that you'll need to learn. And in both cases, maybe after years of experience and practice, you might, when you become successful, you might make a lot of money. In those ways, they might be very similar, but consider for a second how differently they're viewed by the wider society. In particular, nobody says to the medical professional, well, now that you've made your money, you need to give back to society. But they do say that to the business professional, don't they? I'd like to ask you to think about that phrase for a second. Notice that people don't say that businesses or business professionals need to give to society. They say they need to give back. Well, think about when you were a child. If your mother said to you, you need to give that back, what does that mean you did? It means you took something, didn't it? You took something that wasn't yours. You stole something. Well, is that what business does? Is that what we think business is about? Should one atone for engaging in business? Now, I'll just give a general piece of advice, and I say this to my students. If you're about to do something that you think afterwards you need to make up for, that's a red flag. Maybe you ought to really think about not doing whatever it is you're thinking about doing. Maybe we should apply that to business as well. If after considering all the arguments for and against a market society or a commercial society, if we think that engaging in business is the sort of thing for which... a person is going to have to atone afterwards. You need to give back afterwards. Then maybe instead of saying you should give back, maybe what we should say is don't do it. And think about what we say to a thief. We don't say to the thief, well, it's fine as long as some of what you steal you give to charity. We say stop stealing. So here's my proposal. If we're going to continue to engage in business, teach students, to engage in business, in fact, have whole schools dedicated to business, then we really ought to figure out a way to understand business such that it's valuable in itself. In other words, not just for what it might do afterwards, but the actual activity of business itself. So while we're going to have lots of examples in our mind, and the newspapers are full of them, of dishonorable business, if we're going to continue to teach business, maybe dedicate our lives to business, or ask our students to do so, then we better figure out a way to understand how business might be honorable. So that raises the question of why business? So what would be a morally inspiring motivation for going into business? Now, let me take a step back. One of the themes of this conference is metamorphic, which comes from the Greek. It means to change shape or change form, kind of like being a philosophy professor teaching in a business school. Well, one of the things that I've discovered in spending a lot of time around business students and business professors and with economic historians in particular is that they have a lot of data. Let me show you a little data. Take a look at this graph, ladies and gentlemen. This is to show you that even a philosopher can use a graph. What you have here is gross world product. This is the total amount of wealth created by all human beings in the world. 1990 constant international dollars going from today all the way back to, can you see the number there at the far end of that graph? That's a million years ago. That's early hominins on the planet. Now, if you wonder whether we can get good data about that, well, I'll just say economists think so. So I'm just using other economists'data. But what's interesting about that is that is a pretty remarkable change, isn't it? So there are pretty big intervals on the far side of the graph, from a million years ago to 25,000 BC, then you see to year one, then the first millennium, and the second millennium. Throughout all of that time, the total amount of wealth produced in the world was very small. And then something remarkable happened. So you and I today are lucky enough to live in the wealthiest time that human beings have ever existed. lived in in their history. The economist Deirdre McCloskey calls this the great enrichment. Now here's a slightly different way, a second but the only other graph I have. Look at this. This now is total wealth, but this time I'm dividing it by the number of people alive in the earth at the time. So those are, you have a blue line and a red line. The blue line is from the economist Angus Madison who should have won the Nobel Prize before he passed away a few years ago. He calculated this all the way back to year one. The red line comes from Brad DeLong, who's an economist at Berkeley, calculates it back to 12,000 years ago. That is quite a hockey stick, isn't it, ladies and gentlemen? So that is constant dollars, total wealth divided in each year by the number of people alive. Now, if you are a social scientist and you're looking at a graph like that, what's the interesting part of that graph? What do you want to understand? Well, what happened? What changed? Something dramatic changed in human history, leading to levels of wealth, per capita wealth, that's completely unprecedented in human history. Now, are human beings today, alive today, biologically distinct from human beings alive 12,000 years ago? No. If you could transport a child born 12,000 years ago to Winston-Salem, North Carolina today, what would that child be doing? Playing Fortnite like every other child. There's no biological difference, there's no psychological difference. Does climate change? Of course. Climate has gone up and down, but no change. So something dramatic happened in the way human beings began to deal with one another, in the way they began to organize their societies. Now maybe you have a theory about what that is, but I'd like to give you a little bit more information before I give you my own theory. How big has the transformation been? Well, you remember Thomas Hobbes? English philosopher said the life of man nasty poor brutish and short well before about 1800 he was right it was For almost all of human history human beings lived on between one and three contemporary dollars per day Now let me ask you could you live on let's be generous three dollars per day for all of your food clothing Shelter and of course the new iPhone well, maybe you could but it wouldn't be easy Well, what is the state of the world today? Well, today in the world, we have $48 per person per day, again, in constant dollars. And the United States, $164 per person per day. So that's a 16-fold real increase worldwide and a 55-fold real increase in the United States. So that is a huge and dramatic and life-changing change. So let's back to our question. What caused it? Here's my theory, my proposal. I think what caused it was not just institutions, but rather a shift in culture that resulted from a shift in morality. Here's what I mean by that. If somebody has something that you want, there are really two ways you could get it, right? I mean, think of anything. Suppose you want somebody's love, or you want their labor, you'd like them to work for you, or they have a laptop and you would really like that laptop. Someone has a laptop, and you would like that laptop. There are at least two ways to get it. What's one way? Well, one way is, I suppose, you could just steal it. That's sort of the tried and true human way of getting what they want. If you think about the great civilizations of the past, the pharaohs who built the pyramids, the Romans with their coliseum and the aqueducts, you think about the Song Dynasty. Some people got extremely wealthy. The pharaoh, the emperor, Caesar made no real change for the rest of the population. How did they get all of that wealth that was required to build the aqueducts in the Colosseum? By taking it from other places, from other people. So that's one way. What's the other way you could get it? You might make an offer. You might make an offer to someone to exchange or partner or associate that the other person is freely allowed to say no to if they don't want. So how can we characterize these two things? Well, one way we might call extraction. That's theft, slavery. imperialism, fraud, all of the, as I say, tried and true human methods. The other way we might call cooperation. And what's the crucial distinction between the two? Only in cooperation does the other party get a say. Only through cooperation are you relying on the other person's voluntary consent. So here's my suggestion. What began to happen slowly in the 16th century, a little bit more in the 17th century, really began to take off in the 18th, and it really picked up steam, no pun intended, in the 19th century. spreading to other places in the world, was the idea that extraction might be morally wrong. Not just inefficient, not just a bad way of allocating resources, but morally wrong. And that cooperation, asking for people's voluntary assent, was not just allowable, but maybe even morally preferable. And as those moral views changed, that began to shift cultures, which began then to shift institutions. Now, let me ask you, Between extraction and cooperation, which of those two ways is more moral? Well, I hope that's obvious to you. I hope I don't have to make an argument. Cooperation is more moral. But if that seems self-evident to you, it hasn't seemed self-evident throughout all of human history. But let me ask you another question. If that's the more moral way to deal with other people, which way leads to more prosperity? Ah, that's an interesting question. So when you go into Starbucks and you order your double pumpkin spice mocha latte, And the barista says that'll be five dollars. You give your five dollars and you get the latte. Which of you benefited from that transaction? The answer is you both did. Now compare that to a case where suppose you have a laptop and I would like your laptop and I just steal it from you. Which of you, which of us benefited from that transaction? Only me. Extraction is what we might call a zero-sum exchange. Minus one laptop for you, plus one laptop for me, minus one plus plus one is zero. Not creating new prosperity or wealth, just moving it from one place to another. But think about the Starbucks example. In that case, both sides benefit, and we know they had to benefit, because if you didn't think you benefited from buying the latte, you wouldn't have bought the latte. If Starbucks didn't think it benefited from selling you the latte, it wouldn't have sold you the latte. So since you both voluntarily did it, that means you both, from your own individual respective perspectives, think you benefited. Positive value for you, positive value for me, a positive plus a positive is a positive. So how does that, what does that have to do with honorable business? Here's my suggestion. There is a way to engage in honorable business, but first it starts with the don't. And the don't, you can think of on analogy to the oath that medical professionals take, I believe still take, although I stand to be corrected. The Hippocratic oath is, first do no harm. I suggest, I propose in business exactly the same thing. First do no harm, no extractive exchanges. You must make a personal commitment never to engage in exchanges, transactions, partnerships that benefit you, but only at another person's expense. Both parties or all parties to the exchange must benefit. So first, no extractive behavior, and what follows immediately from that is only cooperative behavior. Make a commitment to engage only in cooperative behavior. What does that mean in practice, in concrete? First of all, you have to treat all parties with respect for their autonomy and dignity. That means you give them what I call an opt-out option. Every person must have the right to say no thank you and go somewhere else. And when you think about that opt-out option, the minute that somebody else can say no thank you to you, regardless of what proposal, offer you make, your agencies are immediately leveled. You meet each other as moral equals. That's the way you show respect not just for their autonomy and dignity, but also by respecting their choices. So first, treat people with autonomy and dignity. Second, honor your promises. This is like what we tell our children. If you give your word, you keep it. Now, why is this so important, even when no one is looking? Why is this so important? Because if you don't, if you commit yourself to something and then don't do it, that's just really another way of engaging in extractive behavior because you're getting a benefit for yourself at another person's expense. So if you're not sure you want to keep your word, that's fine, don't give it. If you sign a contract, you give your word, keep it. And finally, a personal commitment to taking your limited time, talent, and treasure not only to benefit yourself, but to benefit others as well, according to their schedules of value. What matters to them, not just what matters to you. If you engage in business practice in this way, my suggestion is this constitutes honorable business because it's a win-win, a win for all of the people involved. Now, one little question here before I close. Is money all that matters? Should we answer this all together, ladies and gentlemen? Is money all that matters? Ah, oh, some of you are not so sure. All right, well, this is my answer. My answer is money is not the only thing that matters. But here's an argument I would make for your consideration. I think wealth can enable the things in life that do matter. If I don't know whether my children can eat today or whether I can eat today, then I'm not thinking about can I write the great American novel or what college will my children go to? I'm thinking about can we eat today? What wealth can do is begin addressing those more immediate and pressing concerns of human life, food, clothing, and shelters, so that we can begin to turn our attention to the things that actually fill out a life of meaning and purpose. In that way, if you're engaging in honorable business, that can allow you not only to benefit yourself and your family, your community, but others as well, as long as you do it at the same time. And in that way, and in that way only, we can get better together. So let me conclude. We started with this question of why go into business. Can a case be made for business? Why should you study it? Should you think about teaching it? Should you dedicate your life to it? Well, if you're going to do it, here's what I would say. Because honorable business, as I've described it, is mutually voluntary, it treats people with dignity and respect. It honors their opt-out option, and it forces us to honor other people's choices, even when we disagree with those choices, even if we think they're making a mistake. We respect them as our moral peers if we honor their choices. And because honorable business is mutually beneficial, it's positive sum, it can lead to increasing overall prosperity. You and the people you work with all get better. So what's the answer to why business? What should you do? Use your limited time, talent, and treasure to find ways not only to benefit yourself, it's okay to find ways to benefit yourself, but only if at the same time, simultaneously, you are benefiting others. And if you have opportunities, which you will in business, to benefit yourself at the expense of others, say no. Don't do it. As a force of your own character. Not because someone's watching, but because you're the sort of person who would never do that. In this way, I propose, you can get both prosperity and morality, but only if business is honorable. So if you're willing to accept or at least consider this version of honorable business, business can turn out not only to be not morally suspicious, not even not amoral, but possibly even a moral calling. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be here. My training is in philosophy. I'm a philosophy PhD, but I teach in a business school here at Wake Forest University.

You might wonder why someone who teaches 18th century British moral philosophy could have found his way into a business school. It's a fair question. But as a philosopher, one of the things I wanted to think about is whether there can be such a thing as this, honorable business. So if you think about business activity and run through in your mind some of the most salient examples of business, chances are you're going to think of a lot of bad things that have happened.

You're going to think about Bernie Madoff, or maybe you're going to think about Enron, or maybe you're going to think about various things you can get on the dark web. But one of the things I discovered in teaching students in the business school is that this is a question they get asked a lot. Why are you studying business?

Now, they get asked this by their fellow students, by professors, including professors from other disciplines. Why are you studying business? And this is usually the only possible answers that they think of.

Well, either to get a job or make money. Well, is it true that business students want to get a job or make money? Sure it is. That's probably also true for every other student and every other discipline as well.

Still, it's not a particularly inspiring vision. Is there some way that we could think of, and again, I'm a moral philosopher, could there be some kind of moral purpose for business? Well, let me ask you to consider a comparison between two professions.

Think of these two professions, medicine and business. Now, in many ways, they're very similar. So they are both professions.

They have specialties and subspecialties. In both cases, they have technical knowledge that you'll need to learn. And in both cases, maybe after years of experience and practice, you might, when you become successful, you might make a lot of money.

In those ways, they might be very similar, but consider for a second how differently they're viewed by the wider society. In particular, nobody says to the medical professional, well, now that you've made your money, you need to give back to society. But they do say that to the business professional, don't they? I'd like to ask you to think about that phrase for a second. Notice that people don't say that businesses or business professionals need to give to society.

They say they need to give back. Well, think about when you were a child. If your mother said to you, you need to give that back, what does that mean you did? It means you took something, didn't it? You took something that wasn't yours.

You stole something. Well, is that what business does? Is that what we think business is about? Should one atone for engaging in business?

Now, I'll just give a general piece of advice, and I say this to my students. If you're about to do something that you think afterwards you need to make up for, that's a red flag. Maybe you ought to really think about not doing whatever it is you're thinking about doing. Maybe we should apply that to business as well.

If after considering all the arguments for and against a market society or a commercial society, if we think that engaging in business is the sort of thing for which... a person is going to have to atone afterwards. You need to give back afterwards.

Then maybe instead of saying you should give back, maybe what we should say is don't do it. And think about what we say to a thief. We don't say to the thief, well, it's fine as long as some of what you steal you give to charity.

We say stop stealing. So here's my proposal. If we're going to continue to engage in business, teach students, to engage in business, in fact, have whole schools dedicated to business, then we really ought to figure out a way to understand business such that it's valuable in itself.

In other words, not just for what it might do afterwards, but the actual activity of business itself. So while we're going to have lots of examples in our mind, and the newspapers are full of them, of dishonorable business, if we're going to continue to teach business, maybe dedicate our lives to business, or ask our students to do so, then we better figure out a way to understand how business might be honorable. So that raises the question of why business?

So what would be a morally inspiring motivation for going into business? Now, let me take a step back. One of the themes of this conference is metamorphic, which comes from the Greek. It means to change shape or change form, kind of like being a philosophy professor teaching in a business school. Well, one of the things that I've discovered in spending a lot of time around business students and business professors and with economic historians in particular is that they have a lot of data.

Let me show you a little data. Take a look at this graph, ladies and gentlemen. This is to show you that even a philosopher can use a graph. What you have here is gross world product. This is the total amount of wealth created by all human beings in the world.

1990 constant international dollars going from today all the way back to, can you see the number there at the far end of that graph? That's a million years ago. That's early hominins on the planet. Now, if you wonder whether we can get good data about that, well, I'll just say economists think so. So I'm just using other economists'data.

But what's interesting about that is that is a pretty remarkable change, isn't it? So there are pretty big intervals on the far side of the graph, from a million years ago to 25,000 BC, then you see to year one, then the first millennium, and the second millennium. Throughout all of that time, the total amount of wealth produced in the world was very small. And then something remarkable happened. So you and I today are lucky enough to live in the wealthiest time that human beings have ever existed.

lived in in their history. The economist Deirdre McCloskey calls this the great enrichment. Now here's a slightly different way, a second but the only other graph I have. Look at this.

This now is total wealth, but this time I'm dividing it by the number of people alive in the earth at the time. So those are, you have a blue line and a red line. The blue line is from the economist Angus Madison who should have won the Nobel Prize before he passed away a few years ago. He calculated this all the way back to year one. The red line comes from Brad DeLong, who's an economist at Berkeley, calculates it back to 12,000 years ago.

That is quite a hockey stick, isn't it, ladies and gentlemen? So that is constant dollars, total wealth divided in each year by the number of people alive. Now, if you are a social scientist and you're looking at a graph like that, what's the interesting part of that graph?

What do you want to understand? Well, what happened? What changed? Something dramatic changed in human history, leading to levels of wealth, per capita wealth, that's completely unprecedented in human history. Now, are human beings today, alive today, biologically distinct from human beings alive 12,000 years ago?

No. If you could transport a child born 12,000 years ago to Winston-Salem, North Carolina today, what would that child be doing? Playing Fortnite like every other child.

There's no biological difference, there's no psychological difference. Does climate change? Of course. Climate has gone up and down, but no change. So something dramatic happened in the way human beings began to deal with one another, in the way they began to organize their societies.

Now maybe you have a theory about what that is, but I'd like to give you a little bit more information before I give you my own theory. How big has the transformation been? Well, you remember Thomas Hobbes? English philosopher said the life of man nasty poor brutish and short well before about 1800 he was right it was For almost all of human history human beings lived on between one and three contemporary dollars per day Now let me ask you could you live on let's be generous three dollars per day for all of your food clothing Shelter and of course the new iPhone well, maybe you could but it wouldn't be easy Well, what is the state of the world today?

Well, today in the world, we have $48 per person per day, again, in constant dollars. And the United States, $164 per person per day. So that's a 16-fold real increase worldwide and a 55-fold real increase in the United States. So that is a huge and dramatic and life-changing change. So let's back to our question.

What caused it? Here's my theory, my proposal. I think what caused it was not just institutions, but rather a shift in culture that resulted from a shift in morality.

Here's what I mean by that. If somebody has something that you want, there are really two ways you could get it, right? I mean, think of anything. Suppose you want somebody's love, or you want their labor, you'd like them to work for you, or they have a laptop and you would really like that laptop.

Someone has a laptop, and you would like that laptop. There are at least two ways to get it. What's one way? Well, one way is, I suppose, you could just steal it.

That's sort of the tried and true human way of getting what they want. If you think about the great civilizations of the past, the pharaohs who built the pyramids, the Romans with their coliseum and the aqueducts, you think about the Song Dynasty. Some people got extremely wealthy.

The pharaoh, the emperor, Caesar made no real change for the rest of the population. How did they get all of that wealth that was required to build the aqueducts in the Colosseum? By taking it from other places, from other people. So that's one way.

What's the other way you could get it? You might make an offer. You might make an offer to someone to exchange or partner or associate that the other person is freely allowed to say no to if they don't want.

So how can we characterize these two things? Well, one way we might call extraction. That's theft, slavery.

imperialism, fraud, all of the, as I say, tried and true human methods. The other way we might call cooperation. And what's the crucial distinction between the two? Only in cooperation does the other party get a say. Only through cooperation are you relying on the other person's voluntary consent.

So here's my suggestion. What began to happen slowly in the 16th century, a little bit more in the 17th century, really began to take off in the 18th, and it really picked up steam, no pun intended, in the 19th century. spreading to other places in the world, was the idea that extraction might be morally wrong.

Not just inefficient, not just a bad way of allocating resources, but morally wrong. And that cooperation, asking for people's voluntary assent, was not just allowable, but maybe even morally preferable. And as those moral views changed, that began to shift cultures, which began then to shift institutions. Now, let me ask you, Between extraction and cooperation, which of those two ways is more moral?

Well, I hope that's obvious to you. I hope I don't have to make an argument. Cooperation is more moral.

But if that seems self-evident to you, it hasn't seemed self-evident throughout all of human history. But let me ask you another question. If that's the more moral way to deal with other people, which way leads to more prosperity?

Ah, that's an interesting question. So when you go into Starbucks and you order your double pumpkin spice mocha latte, And the barista says that'll be five dollars. You give your five dollars and you get the latte.

Which of you benefited from that transaction? The answer is you both did. Now compare that to a case where suppose you have a laptop and I would like your laptop and I just steal it from you.

Which of you, which of us benefited from that transaction? Only me. Extraction is what we might call a zero-sum exchange.

Minus one laptop for you, plus one laptop for me, minus one plus plus one is zero. Not creating new prosperity or wealth, just moving it from one place to another. But think about the Starbucks example. In that case, both sides benefit, and we know they had to benefit, because if you didn't think you benefited from buying the latte, you wouldn't have bought the latte. If Starbucks didn't think it benefited from selling you the latte, it wouldn't have sold you the latte.

So since you both voluntarily did it, that means you both, from your own individual respective perspectives, think you benefited. Positive value for you, positive value for me, a positive plus a positive is a positive. So how does that, what does that have to do with honorable business? Here's my suggestion. There is a way to engage in honorable business, but first it starts with the don't.

And the don't, you can think of on analogy to the oath that medical professionals take, I believe still take, although I stand to be corrected. The Hippocratic oath is, first do no harm. I suggest, I propose in business exactly the same thing.

First do no harm, no extractive exchanges. You must make a personal commitment never to engage in exchanges, transactions, partnerships that benefit you, but only at another person's expense. Both parties or all parties to the exchange must benefit.

So first, no extractive behavior, and what follows immediately from that is only cooperative behavior. Make a commitment to engage only in cooperative behavior. What does that mean in practice, in concrete?

First of all, you have to treat all parties with respect for their autonomy and dignity. That means you give them what I call an opt-out option. Every person must have the right to say no thank you and go somewhere else. And when you think about that opt-out option, the minute that somebody else can say no thank you to you, regardless of what proposal, offer you make, your agencies are immediately leveled.

You meet each other as moral equals. That's the way you show respect not just for their autonomy and dignity, but also by respecting their choices. So first, treat people with autonomy and dignity. Second, honor your promises. This is like what we tell our children.

If you give your word, you keep it. Now, why is this so important, even when no one is looking? Why is this so important? Because if you don't, if you commit yourself to something and then don't do it, that's just really another way of engaging in extractive behavior because you're getting a benefit for yourself at another person's expense.

So if you're not sure you want to keep your word, that's fine, don't give it. If you sign a contract, you give your word, keep it. And finally, a personal commitment to taking your limited time, talent, and treasure not only to benefit yourself, but to benefit others as well, according to their schedules of value.

What matters to them, not just what matters to you. If you engage in business practice in this way, my suggestion is this constitutes honorable business because it's a win-win, a win for all of the people involved. Now, one little question here before I close.

Is money all that matters? Should we answer this all together, ladies and gentlemen? Is money all that matters? Ah, oh, some of you are not so sure. All right, well, this is my answer.

My answer is money is not the only thing that matters. But here's an argument I would make for your consideration. I think wealth can enable the things in life that do matter.

If I don't know whether my children can eat today or whether I can eat today, then I'm not thinking about can I write the great American novel or what college will my children go to? I'm thinking about can we eat today? What wealth can do is begin addressing those more immediate and pressing concerns of human life, food, clothing, and shelters, so that we can begin to turn our attention to the things that actually fill out a life of meaning and purpose.

In that way, if you're engaging in honorable business, that can allow you not only to benefit yourself and your family, your community, but others as well, as long as you do it at the same time. And in that way, and in that way only, we can get better together. So let me conclude.

We started with this question of why go into business. Can a case be made for business? Why should you study it?

Should you think about teaching it? Should you dedicate your life to it? Well, if you're going to do it, here's what I would say. Because honorable business, as I've described it, is mutually voluntary, it treats people with dignity and respect.

It honors their opt-out option, and it forces us to honor other people's choices, even when we disagree with those choices, even if we think they're making a mistake. We respect them as our moral peers if we honor their choices. And because honorable business is mutually beneficial, it's positive sum, it can lead to increasing overall prosperity.

You and the people you work with all get better. So what's the answer to why business? What should you do?

Use your limited time, talent, and treasure to find ways not only to benefit yourself, it's okay to find ways to benefit yourself, but only if at the same time, simultaneously, you are benefiting others. And if you have opportunities, which you will in business, to benefit yourself at the expense of others, say no. Don't do it. As a force of your own character.

Not because someone's watching, but because you're the sort of person who would never do that. In this way, I propose, you can get both prosperity and morality, but only if business is honorable. So if you're willing to accept or at least consider this version of honorable business, business can turn out not only to be not morally suspicious, not even not amoral, but possibly even a moral calling.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Transcript for:Exploring Honorable Business Practices

Transcript for:
Exploring Honorable Business Practices