The Cultural Roots of Ethical Conflicts in Global Business

Sometimes ethics will demand obedience to a law that contradicts an ethical mandate if, for instance, not doing so will cause unfair and disproportionate harms to third parties. Here, however, the legal is not preferred over the ethical because of it being legal, but because of the ethical mandate. In other cases of conflict, the ethical mandate may allow to either follow or oppose the law (ethics, for instance, does not allow us to make injustices, but it allows us to suffer them if we so choose). Again, this is a case of eventually following the law not because the law should be given prevalence but because ethics will allow it. The universal nature of the priority of the moral over the legal should not surprise us once we understand that the ultimate justification for a legal mandate—what the state should impose—always rests on a moral mandate—what people ought to do. Because of this, it is commonly argued that laws that go against ethics are not real laws to be obeyed but arbitrary impositions to be opposed. This, for instance, was the core of the argument against the defence of the Nazi leaders in the Nuremberg trials. The law is the main instrument through which states specify how people ought to behave in specific situations in application of fundamental principles of justice.

Some authors differentiate between descriptive and normative ethics. Descriptive ethics would deal with how people are and act, while normative ethics would account for how people ought to be and act. Others argue that “descriptive ethics” is more about psychology and sociology than about ethics strictly speaking. We are not interested in this polemic right now, but want to emphasize that when we talk about ethical mandates differing across cultures we are basically taking a descriptive stance unless otherwise noted.

This sense of process and progress is implicit in most definitions of truth that look for some form of “adequatio” between reality and its representation (“adequatio intellectus rei” in the classical formulation). Strictly speaking those definitions are not talking of mere “equatio” but equatio “that is tendentially achieved, towards which one progressively tends”, for that is the sense of the Latin “ad” preposition. Like in the process of pursuing the universal, achieving truth talks more about the a priori unending process of search than about realizing its final state of complete “equatio”. This is so because full and final truth, like the full and final universal, are so much bigger than us as humans that some philosophers feel the need to point that, properly speaking, truth is not something that one may hold or have. To the contrary, if anything, it is truth that may have and hold you (see, for instance, in Spanish, Alejandro Llano, 2007, “Cultura y pasión”, Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, p. 27-42).

Universalistic, or rule-based, cultures believe that everyone should be held accountable to the same rules that are equally applied; while particularistic, or relationship-based, cultures allow room for exceptions to rules based on close personal relationships or unique situations.