Ethics pays? Does it matter?

All discussions about ethics in business sooner or later lead to a question, a dilemma, such as: but is it profitable? Some even say that you should choose either ethics or business. You can't have it all. Either you will run your business ethically but you will have financial difficulties, or you will achieve financial success, please do not ask about moral costs ...

It seems that these two values ​​are in sharp conflict with each other. We have a typical win-lose game. Everyone has to choose. But do we really have an axiological conflict here? Do entrepreneurs have to choose "either / or"?

It is obvious that running a business is a commercial activity. We just have to earn money. However, not every business or business model is profitable. The company does not always generate profit. This is perfectly normal. Usually, financial success is not related to our ideological preferences, religiosity or morality at all. Business just has it that it can be unprofitable. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that we achieve financial success without knowing and not fully understanding its reasons. We make money, big money, and we don't even think or ask about the moral implications. We just do our job well. We deliver the right product or service. We have the right customers, suppliers and employees. We manage the company well. Can we then be ethically ignorant? Probably so.

Sooner or later, however, the question will arise about the sense of what we do and how we do it. There will be a new quality, a new, independent perspective. Perhaps the company will mean something more or something else. Perhaps we will be happy not so much that we have signed another contract, but rather with whom, where and how. Do we create positive relationships through our work and business decisions, is the offer more competitive and the people who make up the organization are more perfect? Maybe such an attitude and such thinking lead to economic ignorance. Perhaps it may but it of course does not have to.

And one more thing. Ethical sensitivity is an independent category. It really doesn't make much of economic difference when what we do is ethically worthwhile. Good is good in itself. It is an autotelic value. Is it worth it from economic point of view? Who cares? I don’t.