Being ethical means learning to love

Why did inhabitants of Easter Island, isolated in the South Pacific, cut down the island's last tree hundreds of years ago? This question, though somewhat rhetorical, continues to plague scientists and intellectuals. Looking beyond the basic environmental and social consequences, one must ask if the people of Easter Island ever evaluated whether the proposed action of cutting down trees was the right one to satisfy their future needs. 

According to IESE economics professor Antonio Argandoña by using better human organization and evaluative decision theories, humans and groups of humans make more effective and, above all, more meaningful decisions. For example, if the reckless Easter Islanders had used unity and ethics based on action theory, they might not have consumed the entire forest, which ultimately destroyed social order and led to a bloody civil war and cannibalism.

It's all about making sound decisions. Argandoña's philosophical paper presents ethics in both humans and organizations and how they influence the effectiveness of a decision, in public policy or in a company. His theories can be applied to any situation, even Easter Island.

Argandoña's writings on the subject draws upon the earlier work of the late economics professor Juan Antonio Pérez López whose ethical conceptions are deeply rooted in action and organization theories.

According to Pérez López, ethics plays a dominant role in decision making and therefore control the effectiveness of each and every decision we as humans make. For an action to be satisfactory, the active agent (the person making the decision) must consider more than just the response of the receiver of the action and the satisfaction this response gives the active agent.

In other words, Pérez López and Argandoña agree that the results of the action are measured by more than just immediate satisfaction of the subject performing the action but also by other effects related to his cognitive and moral learning. In the case of the Easter Islanders, who cut down trees in order to raise enormous stone statues to please their Gods, they should have considered not just the direct effects of deforestation (lack of fuel for fire), but also the long-term effects (lack of future fuel, shelter and food).

Decision making realities can be defined by aspects of operational knowledge, or what the subject learns about the decision, and evaluative knowledge or the "ability to recognize other people's inner states and assess the consistency of an action."

Pérez López writes: "When a person stops taking other people's needs -other people's motives- into account, she is ignoring the most fundamental aspect of reality."

Argandoña uses the business model as an example of acquiring operational and evaluative knowledge. If a vendor abuses a customer's confidence to make a sale, he is unlikely to be able to make future sales to that customer. For this reason, "The changes that take place in the active agent when he takes into account (or ignores) the effects that the action he is about to perform will have on the reactive agent" are important, claims Argandoña. "Those are the changes that explain how the agent actually improves," he continues, and that is the point of integrating ethics into organizations and economics. Or as his mentor Pérez López puts it: "Evaluating human acts according to how much they improve the person who performs them is the very substance of ethics."

By Argandoña's standards, Pérez López's theory is "positive" in that it explains if a person makes inconsistent decisions. In the long run, the change in consistency will affect the effectiveness an