Event

The University of the West Indies will host a Professorial Inaugural Lecture presented by Professor Surendra Arjoon entitled, "What went wrong with the World: The Ethical Challenge for Business in the 21st Century".

The lecture will be held at The Noor Hassanali Auditorium, Faculty of Law from 5:30pm. All are invited.

Abstract:

Today’s moral climate can be traced to a hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity of 17th & 18th centuries morality which defended the turn from the object to the subject as the source of truth, with its consequent derailment of freedom from truth. Since then, business and society have been undergoing a pathological moral mutation in which truth becomes a matter of taste or is negotiable, characterized by our inability to distinguish between right and wrong and to come to a consensus on moral issues. Phenomena such as the recent global financial crisis are its logical outcome and whose causes of failure can be understood at three interdependent levels:

(1) rotten apple (this occurs when the individual succumbs to the temptations inherent in the workplace) which is characterized by broken characters,

(2) rotten barrel (this describes the toxic organizational culture that promotes opportunities for ethical transgressions) which is characterized by disordered organizations , and

(3) rotten core (this relates to the ethicality of the socio-economic-political or ideological system of governance) which is characterized by ethically-deficient capitalist economies.

The ultimate solution to the ethical challenges that arise in business requires and demands the development of the virtuous agent, the virtuous organization and the virtuous economy. Central to the notion of virtuousness are the concepts of goods of excellence and goods of efficiency supported by the practical ethical principles of human dignity, the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity to improve ethical behavior and organizational effectiveness, and to guide the market economy.