Ethics in a time of crisis: editorial introduction to special focus

Abstract

The financial crisis that has swept the globe since 2008 still rumbles on. Not only has it precipitated a sovereign debt crisis in Europe, and threatened growth rates and political stability in India and China, but also the liquidity of many banks is still a matter of debate. Despite the refuge that capital has taken in assets other than finance, worries remain that the basic financial machine may again freeze up in a renewed bout of crisis. The alternative to everincreasing waves of crisis hardly looks more appealing, however. Ordinary people from Britain to Greece, Spain to California, face years of austerity, starved social programs, and precarious employment. These sacrifices occur against multiple smoldering resentments. In Greece, for example, what can only be described as a simmering hatred for Germany infects daily conversation; in the United States, bitterness at the immunity of what have been dubbed ‘the 1%’ is on the rise. In the background, the claimed technical certainties that counterbalance all the talk of irrational exuberance and the dangers of animal spirits have experienced their own epistemological crisis. How many experts declared the end of boom and bust? How many put faith in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and social enterprise rather than governmental regulation? Speaking from a position that is still clearly within this time of crisis, this special issue cannot help but start with its own conditions of possibility today. Rather than ask – as one might do in less extraordinary times – what is the proper role for business ethics, this issue concentrates instead on what business ethics might come to be under conditions of what feels to many like a state of permanent crisis. As crisis becomes the image of the age; we can begin to see in this image the reality of what Walter Benjamin called ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Benjamin 1999: 463). All the previous conditions of crisis for business ethics in the last 20 years, from outsourcing and sweated labour to environmental crimes and accounting scandals, now appear both local and symptomatic, in the face of the truly global financial crisis. If these past challenges raised the question of whether business ethics was adequate to the task, the global crisis did not, in a sense, stop to ask. Business has not only been unable to regulate itself, including ethically, but it was unable to immunize itself from sheer self-destruction. Given that business ethics – and its offshoots corporate social responsibility, sustainable business, and social entrepreneurship – tends to present itself largely as a counterbalance to the idea of state intervention in corporate behaviour, the financial crisis was obviously not just a crisis of finance, or of global economy, but of business ethics, too. Not because of this or that inadequacy or because of a problem of application as in past crises, but this time at the very level of its own sustainability; at the level of what we might call the ontology of business ethics, its very prospects for continued existence. As it turns out,