Ep. 65: Patricia Werhane - The Ethics of Commerce During Crisis

About Patricia Werhane: https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/profile/patricia-werhane
Article About Patricia Werhane: https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/news/2019/10/01/werhane-tackles-tough-ethical-issues-for-gies-students

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. We are here for you today with episode 65 of our series. As we've addressed in many recent episodes, the Coronavirus has affected various aspects of accounting and finance. Today you will hear Adam speak with Patricia Werhane and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Gies College of Business and a fellow for the Center of Professional Responsibility in business and society. Patricia is also a co-producer of an Emmy award winning documentary television series in the Chicago area titled Big Questions. In this episode she talks about the ethics of commerce during these difficult business times. Let's head over and listen to their conversation now. 

Adam: (00:53)

So today in the podcast we have Patricia Werhane with us. Patricia, thanks so much for coming. 

Patricia: (00:57)

Thank you for having me. 

Adam: (00:59)

Now, Patricia, you've been speaking lately about ethical dilemmas facing the global economy in light of the pandemic that we are in. So I was hoping you can share some of those insights with us today. 

Patricia: (01:08)

Let me start by posing the question and then I want to give a couple of quotes from people who support that. So the real question I think we're facing right now as you know, how should we balance public health with the pandemic and social isolation with the financial health where massive unemployment will be economically disastrous? In fact, it already is. So is this an either or and we see this in the news all the time or is there a middle path? Let me give you two contrasting viewpoints. The first is from a Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, and he argues that Americans should go back to work even if that causes the deaths of their grandparents who will willingly sacrifice their lives for the sake of economic growth. Well, I know some grandparents who may be not quite so willing, but we'll see. Now on the other side is Governor Cuomo from New York, and you know, of course who he is. He says, given the choice between economic prosperity and the preservation of human life, every life is worth saving at whatever costs to the economy. Now you can see these two balancing and contrasting views and we hear about them in the news all the time and we hear our governors and our presidents going back and forth about this and the center for disease control. We're just caught up in this dilemma, so I want us to think about the dilemma and then I'm going to make some comments about it and then we'll come to some sort of resolution. I hope. 

Adam: (02:45)

I was wondering if you could tackle the local identity versus the inner inactivity and the dependence on global commerce issue. 

Patricia: (02:51)

This one of the important things to think about in this dilemma, and you all know this, I'm sure and that is we live in this global world, although we focus locally on the people who are ill and some of them are our relatives and our friends,O f course. We are globally independent economically. There's an enormous interconnectivity in goods and services. For example, most of you are on your iPads or your cell phones or your computers. All of those are made with parts from many countries of the world. And I don't recommend taking them apart and looking whichI have done with an old cell phone and you can't tell where the parts are from actually. They're not all marked. But Dell computer for example, says their all their computers are made from parts from 22 countries. So you can see this interconnectivity and look at your clothes. I'm wearing clothes from Vietnam, Bangladesh, Korea, and Italy. I won't describe which ones. I don't have one single thing on me that is made in the United States. Over 20% of our food is imported. I hadn't realized that. The ventilators and the respirators and the other health care equipment we desperately need are made in parts from all over the world. Now this means that we have to think very carefully about this challenge. And as Martin Luther King actually said, some in the 1960s, if you can imagine, he says, we live in an inescapable network of mutuality. And that's that network in which this pandemic is, you'll remember that we all thought it was a China problem, but of course as we know it's a global problem. It's not just China. 

Adam: (04:36)

Then what's your theory on the perspective we should take on this issue? 

Patricia: (04:40)

How? How should we think about it? I'm a, I'm a business ethicists. I'm a professional ethicists. I think about these problems all the time. So I'm going to present us with kind of three perspectives from an ethical point of view that will help us think through this problem that I've created for us and actually I haven't created. It's been created and I'm just talking about it. The first is obviously we all know about this is basic human rights. In the United States, we have a bill of rights, but in 1948, the United Nations developed the universal declaration of human rights and everyone, every member country is supposed to sign onto it. Not actually they do sign onto it, but many of them forget after they sign on that they actually are supposed to enforce these rights. But anyway, the basic rights are obvious, the right to life, but also the right to survival. The right to survival means I have a right to work, to do whatever I can to survive. And then I have the basic freedoms, freedom to speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, or not, freedom to worship or not, freedom to work or freedom not to work actually, and many other rights. Actually United nations is very nice and said, we have a right to a vacation, but of course I love that, but I'm not many people honor that. Right. Actually. And then interestingly, because many of you are in business and commerce, in 2015, the United nations developed a protocol, a voluntary obviously for businesses arguing that the role of business is to respect, protect and remedy abuses of human rights wherever they are in operation, wherever they're operating. I think that's very interesting. It means that organizations as well as individuals have basic rights, but they also, we have obligations to each other. One of those obligations is to respect the dignity of every single human being. Sometimes, of course we don't. The second principle to think about is fairness. There are endless, endless literatures on fairness. I won't inflict on you, but one of the basic ones is to treat every person as an equal. Now that's the principle underlining delivery of healthcare. We don't have enough of anything. We don't have enough ventilators. We don't have enough respirators. We don't even have enough room in our emergency rooms to deliver healthcare to every person who needs it. So in the healthcare thinking, they do triage and you probably all know that that is, they take the, if you think about the people who are coming in, t...