Tag: Ethics

Academics and think-tanks need to be reminded that generating publicity is not a legitimate research objective. The study of business is afflicted by confusion between the results of a survey of what people think about the world and a survey of what the world is really like.

The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad.

Making decisions that balance human life against costs is unavoidable. We prefer them to be made by public agencies than by private companies. And we deny that we make these judgments ourselves, although we do so every day.

For the next 50 years, there will be a large legacy of pension commitments, made and received in good faith but identified with companies whose current owners have no commercial interest in fulfilling the responsibilities their predecessors assumed.

Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.

The phenomenon of Galileo’s telescope – the intention to see only what one expects to see – is pervasive in modern politics, business and finance. And the capacity to observe things as they are, even if the implications are unwelcome, is often a recipe for personal unhappiness and professional isolation.

Because all discovery and creative work is derivative, claims to originality usually rest on narrow technical grounds. The exact form, rather than the substantive content, of the invention, the program, the lyric or the plot matters.

The spread of the concept of discrimination to more and more areas of activity is a striking example of the power of emotive language to extinguish critical thought. The practice and consequence of declaring non-discrimination a governing principle is to give power to regulatory bureaucrats and politically motivated obsessives.

Large scale philanthropy, as practised by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, is a business of economic significance rather than clarity.

When it comes to the public communication of scientific findings a further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track. Most academic research is therefore simply boring and eccentricity less tolerated. But any form of censorship encourages complacency and discourages innovation.