What is a promise to be ethical worth if ethics are unclear?

People on Twitter discuss the new business school ethics oaths taken by recent grads (written about in the New York Times article, A Promise to be Ethical in an Era of Immorality." Are such oaths a meaningless gesture or a step on the right direction?

This is a period of ethical assessment. What is a "promise to be ethical" worth when it isn't entirely clear where the line is between profit and the greater good? Many people, from undergraduates to seasoned executives, are working together to tackle this massive ethical question, and significant progress is being made coming to terms with the fact that systems have to change in order for authentic ethical oaths to be meaningful.

Joel Bakan's book and film "The Corporation The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," explains: The corporate legal entity under present law is considered a person. That person, based upon it's personality and characteristics, Bakan argues, is an irresponsible, remorseless, superficial, reckless psychopath. But the people who compose it are not, as the ethics oath suggest, aware of the collective result of their contributions toward the psychosis. The intrinsic and extrinsic results of the decision-making process are not always clear at the time they manifest.

I was with Joel Bakan during his NYC premiere party at the Avalon (which I still think of as the Limelight). While I interviewed him, a guest drifted by dressed as the businessman in silhouette on the front of Joel's book. I can still see him now. He carries a briefcase. Floating above his head, suspended as if in air but actually attached to a thin wire, is a feathered white halo. From the back of his ubiquitous stuffy dark suit, a devil tail trails.

The people who work for corporations are not unearthly demons that slime up out of sulfurous caverns filled with "clean coal," despite the mandate to place profits above all else, even at the peril of the planet and the people who inhabit it. Those people are just regular folks, getting up in the morning, getting dressed in dry cleaned suits, grabbing their briefcases and carrying the full weight of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.

The dialogue between these two opposing forces has been blurred, like listening to chants in a foreign language. The words are still being translated. Once that painstaking process occurs, the words have to be synthesized into concepts across many boundaries. Dangerous individuals and organizations that don't care about the long term or even the immediate widespread effects of greed will continue to exist well beyond the ethics oath, and few among them, it can easily be imagined, will have a problem pulling out the ethics card to prove his good intentions.

Bloodsport greed went mainstream, but it was only a matter of time before the game collapsed. Nevertheless, the fact that business school grads are thinking along the lines of ethics oaths, reactionary or not, demonstrates the beginning of a new era that should be seriously supported.

“I don’t see this as something that will fade away,” Diana C. Robertson a professor of business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told the NYT's Leslie Wayne. “It’s coming from the students. I don’t know that we’ve seen such a surge in this activism since the 1960s. This activism is different, but, like that time, it is student-driven.”

Talented entrepreneurs have been newly released into the wild and they're looking to create space for themselves and their work in a changing world at a time of unprecedented collaborative design capabilities. They have a great responsibility on their shoulders to design fair, transparent and authentic systems that not only minimize harm to the planet and the people on it, but to pave the way for the maturation of increasing interconnectedness. This will require an ethical commitment to fearlessness, transparency and accountability. At the MBA oath site, volunteers are asked to get involved. Count me in.

Rita J. King is an investigative journalist who specializes in deciphering the consequences and motivation of corporate culture (read "Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast" or the newly published "Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina") and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Rita is the CEO and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions (DIP), a company that works in the service of a new global culture and economy in the Imagination Age, which is marked by innovation, forward motion, and a new way of seeing.