A recent Financial Times column asked an intriguing question: Can moral companies do immoral things? The writer cited two U.K. studies that examined, in part, how people rate their morality and how they rate that morality against others. The consistent finding in both studies was that individuals — even convicted prisoners in one study — tend to rate themselves morally superior.
The writer then made the case that this natural tendency for viewing ourselves as morally superior might help explain why moral companies do immoral things. I believe this kind of thinking, while making for interesting navel gazing, is dangerous.
We cannot afford to fall into the trap of assigning human characteristics to nonhuman subjects when it comes to how we act in business.…