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Summary Ethics and the Future of Business Session 3 (Grade 9,5)
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301 HoffmanPeople in business have a tremendous and increasing influence on how our society is
structured, whether that is through the resources they control, the political clout they wield
in government, the ability they have to sway public opinion, or simply the salaries they
derive.
Business case: always sell something by means of how much value it provides (economic
value for example).
Dystopia: everything is going to hell OR re-enlightenment: rethink the relationship between
humans and nature
We need more business leaders who want to assume the responsibility that comes with the
great power they possess by using that power to improve the world for all of us, not just a
select few. They need management as a calling, one that goes beyond just monetary value
and has additional benefits for the world for sustainability purposes and to reduce inequality.
David Brooks described this focus as a shift from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues in setting
goals for your life. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy
virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral—whether you were kind, brave,
honest or faithful. We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé
ones.
For those who wish to preserve their position within the economy and continue behaviour
and thought as before, this allows maintenance of the status quo, but only temporarily as
collapses in social and environmental systems make the status quo untenable due to either
massive economic disruption from increasingly damaging storm events or social disruption
in the form of mass political mobilization in protests, the voting booth, or violence.
302 Griskevicius
An evolutionary approach suggests that just as the forces of natural selection can shape
morphological features, such as the shape of our hands, those forces also shape behavioural
and psychological tendencies. This approach maintains that humans inherit brains and
bodies equipped to behave in ways that are adaptive—that is, fit to the demands of the
environments within which their ancestors evolved. However, people are not always aware of
the evolutionary reasons for their behaviour, and the behavioural tendencies that were
adaptive in ancestral environments are not always adaptive today.
An evolutionary perspective draws an important distinction between ultimate and proximate
explanations for behavior.
Proximate explanations, which focus on relatively immediate triggers for behaviour
(e.g. culture, incentives, preferences, learning, utility, pleasure, happiness, values,
emotions, and personality).
Ultimate, evolutionary reasons for behaviour — to ask why humans evolved to
behave in a certain way. The 5 explanations.
, It is important to note that proximate and ultimate explanations are not competing. Instead,
they are complementary, explaining behaviour at different levels of analyses. Because human
behaviour is the product of brain activity and the brain is an evolved organ, all behaviours
have both ultimate and proximate explanations. For example, children like sweet foods
because such treats elicit pleasure (proximate reason) and because humans have evolved to
crave sweet and fatty foods (ultimate reason).
Evolutionary motives often guide behaviour in an automatic, nonconscious manner. An
important insight from this work is that people are often unaware of the evolutionary
reasons behind their behaviour, but because behaviour has both proximate and ultimate
motives, people often have multiple motives for a given behaviour. For example, a pro-
environmental act can be driven by altruistic motives at the proximate level (e.g., “I want to
be nice and help the environment”) but also by nonconscious selfish motives at the ultimate
level (e.g., “Being nice helps my reproductive fitness by enhancing my reputation”).
Although our Stone Age brains are designed to produce adaptive behaviors in the ancestral
environment, this does not mean that they will always produce adaptive behaviors today
(e.g. evolved desire for sexual gratification can lead to modern behavior with no evolutionary
benefits, such as watching pornography, which is sexually arousing but does little to help
people’s reproductive fitness). An evolutionary approach emphasizes that there is often a
mismatch between what our brains were designed to confront and what we confront in the
modern world. This is because brain evolution takes many thousands of years, but the
environment (e.g., technology) has changed much more rapidly.
An evolutionary approach argues that strategies to change eating behavior may be more
effective if they are directly matched to the evolutionary mechanism driving the problem.
Many modern environmental and social problems are caused or exacerbated by five
adaptive tendencies rooted in evolutionary history: (1) propensity for self-interest, (2)
motivation for relative rather than absolute status, (3) proclivity to unconsciously copy
others, (4) predisposition to be short-sighted, and (5) proneness to disregard impalpable
concerns.
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