Ethics - contrary to the moral that refers to customs and habits - are related to “immutable” universal principles that consider individuals as the basis for finding the best way to live, in both the private and public spaces.
Ethics of duty had an excessive influence on the formation and development of processes of business cultures in the XIX and XX Centuries. In this context, notably based on Christian and Islamic religious philosophies, ethics of duty presented dogmatic sets of commands and rules that had to be obeyed independently of individual will.
Notwithstanding, the renaissance impulses in favor of the Greek eudaimonia ideals, or of the illuminists in favor of reason, in the face of the mass mentally ill of the job in the mat of the industrial revolutions, ethics of duty were imposed not only on the corporate day to day, but also on the most diverse aspects of the social life: family, community, nation and, above all, in the love-fear relationship with God.
It is interesting to observe that, in the last three decades, excellent transformations in these anchors have had an undeniable impact on social ethics: the family nucleus even more reduced and unstable, digitalization of the community in ephemeral and superficial networks, patriotic disillusionment and spiritual insufficiency in satisfying increasingly material desires. All this has derailed deontology.
In this ethical vacuum, reviving the ethical principles of affection (understood here as the joy of pleasure and the fear of sadness), has just fortified the self-centered perspective that characterizes the ethics of pleasure, according to which the search for satisfying individuals’ aspirations and necessities has even strengthened the social interactions that generate meaning and project the idealized context of life.
Traditional organizations comprised of command-control structures in which the work is perceived as transactional and career as an expression of professional success, now have to deal with this new field of forces imposed from without, and from within, as occurs with major sociological phenomena. In this new context, leaders and subordinates have been searching even more for maximum power to express their virtues, cognitive capacities and ethical ideals to well beyond the operational limits of the companies. The term “work” is in check.
In the ethics of pleasure, the “inspired purpose” defines this new perspective that is added to the “normative formation in critical events” and to the “identification with the leaderships” in the formation and development processes of the organizational culture. Well beyond recent pamphlets on corporative self- assistance and fashionable playgrounds office, the search for an inspired purpose that strengthens internal cohesion and addresses the resolution of external problems resolutions by means of a new semiotic concept, has only brought more instability to the cultural phenomenon.
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Daniel Augusto Motta, PhD, MSc
Founder & CEO BMI Blue Management Institute
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