Business ethics is normative, which means it concerns how people ought to act. Descriptive ethics depicts how people actually are acting.
At the University of Alabama, Virginia Tech, and anywhere kickback textbooks are being sold, there are probably a few students who check their bank accounts, find that the number is low, and decide to mount their own kickback scheme: refund the entire textbook cost to themselves by sneaking a copy out of the store. Trying to make a decision about whether that’s justified—does economic necessity license theft in some cases?—is normative ethics. By contrast, investigating to determine the exact number of students walking out with free books is descriptive. So too is tallying the reasons for the theft: How many steal because they don’t have the money to pay? How many accuse the university of acting dishonestly in the first place and say that licenses theft? How many question the entire idea of private property?
The fields of descriptive ethics are many and varied. Historians trace the way penalties imposed for theft have changed over time. Anthropologists look at the way different cultures respond to thievery. Sociologists study the way publications, including Abbie Hoffman’s incendiary book titled Steal This Book, have changed public attitudes about the ethics of theft. Psychologists are curious about the subconscious forces motivating criminals. Economists ask whether there’s a correlation between individual wealth and the kind of moral rules subscribed to. None of this depends on the question about whether stealing may actually be justifiable, but all of it depends on stealing actually happening.
Ethics versus Other Forms of Decision
When students stand in the bookstore flipping through the pages of a budget buster, it’s going to cross a few minds to stick it in the backpack and do a runner. Should they? Clear-headed ethical reflection may provide an answer to the question, but that’s not the only way we make decisions in the world. Even in the face of screaming ethical issues, it’s perfectly possible and frequently reasonable to make choices based on other factors. They include:
- The law
- Prudence (practicality)
- Religion
- Authority figures
- Peer pressure
- Custom
- Conscience
When the temptation is there, one way to decide whether to steal a book is legal: if the law says I can’t, I won’t. Frequently, legal prohibitions overlap with commonly accepted moral rules: few legislators want to sponsor laws that most believe to be unjust. Still, there are unjust laws. Think of downloading a text (or music, or a video) from the web. One day the downloading may be perfectly legal and the next, after a bill is passed by a legislature, it’s illegal. So the law reverses, but there’s no reason to think the ethics—the values and arguments guiding decisions about downloading—changed in that short time. If the ethics didn’t change, at least one of the two laws must be ethically wrong. That means any necessary connection between ethics and the law is broken. Even so, there are clear advantages to making decisions based on the law. Besides the obvious one that it’ll keep you out of jail, legal rules are frequently cleaner and more direct than ethical determinations, and that clarity may provide justification for approving (or disapproving) actions with legal dictates instead of ethical ones. The reality remains, however, that the two ways of deciding are as distinct as their mechanisms of determination. The law results from the votes of legislators, the interpretations of judges, and the understanding of a policeman on the scene. Ethical conclusions result from applied values and arguments.
Religion may also provide a solution to the question about textbook theft. The Ten Commandments, for example, provide clear guidance. Like the law, most mainstream religious dictates overlap with generally accepted ethical views, but that doesn’t change the fact that the rules of religion trace back to beliefs and faith, while ethics goes back to arguments.
Prudence, in the sense of practical concern for your own well-being, may also weigh in and finally guide a decision. With respect to stealing, regardless of what you may believe about ethics or law or religion, the possibility of going to jail strongly motivates most people to pay for what they carry out of stores. If that’s the motivation determining what’s done, then personal comfort and welfare are guiding the decision more than sweeping ethical arguments.
Authority figures may be relied on to make decisions: instead of asking whether it’s right to steal a book, someone may ask themselves, “What would my parents say I should do? Or the soccer coach? Or a movie star? Or the president?” While it’s not clear how great the overlap is between decisions based on authority and those coming from ethics, it is certain that following authority implies respecting the experience and judgment of others, while depending on ethics means relying on your own careful thinking and determinations.
Urges to conformity and peer pressure also guide decisions. As depicted by the startling and funny Asch experiments (see Video Clip 1.1), most of us palpably fear being labeled a deviant or just differing from those around us. So powerful is the attraction of conformity that we’ll deny things clearly seen with our own eyes before being forced to stand out as distinct from everyone else.