Ethics always on the table

Tectonic shifts are slow and inexorable. The continents of the earth move at a rate that, without the most sensitive of scientific instruments, none of us can detect, although we know that once upon an extraordinary length of time ago, what we know as Africa was joined to Asia – and, more startlingly, England was France.

The idea of tectonic shifts has entered the language and represents a concept that defines enormous and very slow change. But we talk about them as rapid rather than slow and imperceptible, and we often apply them to dangerous shifts in behaviour.

Linking them to mighty natural changes makes them more dramatic. You could link them, for example, to the commonly accepted and understood principles of ethics – always worth arguing about. Change here, once deemed tectonic in its slow evolution, now seems to be better represented by volcanos: sudden eruptions of changing behaviours.

Historical perspective

But let’s put it into perspective. Journalist Alistair Cooke broadcast a Letter From America every week from 1946 to 2004, the longest-running radio series in broadcasting history. In 1988, when George Bush senior had been nominated as the Republican Party candidate, Cooke reported him as saying, ‘casually enough for it not to be widely reported, that he intended to set up an ethics commission to sketch out a code of behaviour for the presidential staff. On his first day in office [as president, a year later], he again talked earnestly to his cabinet and told them he expected from them the highest possible code of conduct.’

Cooke put this into perspective with an anecdote from further back. ‘President Eisenhower had … as a political chief of staff a former New England governor of great administrative gifts and, we assumed, of untouchable probity. He accepted one Christmas time a present of a coat, a vicuna coat, from a banker who could very likely do business with a government department. Eisenhower was appalled and saddened, but never hesitated. The distinguished aide and former governor was banished to obscurity.’

Clinging to the concept

This is what I meant when I suggested that change in the way ethics are invoked or implemented has been astonishing in its speed and has, frankly, been turned on its head. Although the gift of a coat seems astonishingly insignificant compared to what seems to be commonplace in our world of Musk’s Trump’s and cryptocurrencies, we accountants and finance professionals cling to the concept of ethics.

In many ways it defines what we probably see as a unique selling proposition – people who stand in the middle with restraining arms apart, calling for sanity and some sort of objective proof.

The discussion then centres around what are human values and how those values can, if at all possible, align. But, to return to Cooke, he, too, recognised the complexities. A president could say simply: ‘Go to work and behave! And if you don’t, I’ll fire you!’,  but ‘that’s not the way of a democracy,’ said Cooke. ‘We appoint a commission or committee to redefine principles of conduct. I think it unlikely that its report will be as short and sharp as either the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments’.

Ethics is a complicated concept. And increasingly we have shorter and shorter periods to implement satisfactory conclusions.