How Not to Jump to Conclusions When Judging Business People and Situations

Over the years, I have written a few posts discussing the issue of judging other people (1, 2, 3).

Applying ethical principles to make moral judgments in business is particularly challenging, requiring much research and sorting before making a decision. Taking time to process the acquired data is necessary to avoid making unsound decisions.

There are three overlapping steps in the process: gathering all relevant facts before making a judgment, identifying and separating moral values from optional ones, and, most difficult, identifying and sorting out the role and influence of government in our modern mixed (or worse) economies.

Let us take these overlapping steps one at a time.

Facts. As I would always tell my students, “Dig, dig, dig for the facts. Do you have all of them?” One new fact can overturn a previous conclusion. Calling a person inconsiderate when cutting in line, for example, should change when you realize the cut was inadvertent.

Options. In one of my previous posts, I encouraged readers “to get beneath surface appearances and not be swayed by looks, words, or demeanor.” In other words, style. I emphasized the abstractness and universality of moral values and virtues, cautioning readers not to elevate concretes and optional tastes to the status of moral judgment, such as eating red meat or drinking water out of plastic bottles.

And the use of hyperbole and BS usually does not make another person immoral. Learning the other person’s psychology is prerequisite to making moral judgments. The hyperbole and BS may be the result of years of entrenched defensive habits, often learned from parents. (It’s also called “sellers’ puff” in the law and is ineffective as a marketing technique.)

Competence in business is an expression of the moral value of productive work, but level of competence usually does not entail anything immoral, though it may mean management should work harder to find the appropriate slot for someone who is less competent in the current job.

Personality is our distinctive way of thinking and acting and does include character, but most interaction with other people involves sharing and working with their concrete values and morally optionally tastes and preferences. So-called personality conflicts usually have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with options—looks, words, demeanor, style.

The importance of getting to know partners was impressed upon me in my six-plus years working for the same company in New York City. The company was founded by two men ten years before I arrived. While there, I did notice that the partners’ offices were at opposite ends of the building, but did not think anything of it at the time. Friction between the owners was mentioned by some co-workers and once I did see what must have been a serious or unpleasant disagreement between them, but in the entire time I worked at the company I never observed a dishonesty (and I don’t think there ever was any). About ten years later, after I had left the company to attend graduate school, I read that the company had closed and the two men were suing each other.*

Moral of the story? Business partnerships (and I include mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions) are marriages with over half ending either in divorce or with the stronger partner taking over the business.

Taking time to get to know a future partner, including the partner’s judgment of others, is crucial. There does not have to be immoral behavior to cause a breakup in the relationship; most values that we hold are concrete and optional and accepting and enjoying many of the same ones are required for cooperative success.

Government. Identifying and sorting the components of a more general situation in business, such as opinions, personality, and, especially, government intervention are required before judging. This last is not always easy to find, since most today do not think about how government can affect a moral evaluation, nor does the press report such interventions. More digging in search engines to read several articles presenting alternative viewpoints is required.

A 2002 academic paper of mine demonstrates the sorting I am talking about. It untangles many issues surrounding bribery, including its common law definition and the frequent conflating of it with several other terms—perk, grease payment, extortion, broker’s fee, and even candy or money offered to a child to clean his or her room. (Yes, it’s called bribing the child! Should mom be put in the slammer?? No, it’s metaphor, not ethics or law.)

Regulatory agencies, to elaborate further, are major initiators of physical force against businesses, through their nonobjective law, arbitrary rule-making, and catering to favored lobbyists at the expense of those who do not lobby or cannot afford to lobby. Violations of regulatory rules by the people or companies being regulated should not be taken as immoral action. The agencies themselves, not necessarily the regulators (bureaucrats) running them, are the ones that are immoral and unconstitutional, as they combine the legislative, judicial, and executive into one bureau (1, 2).

What I have concluded about judging others is that it takes time getting to know them personally before declaring, for example, a dishonesty. The adage “haste makes waste,” though trite, is relevant here. It should mean: don’t hop into bed after one or two dates or sign a business partnership after one meeting. Personalities and business situations are complex.

The most complex and challenging moral issue in business ethics is what I have called marketing to morally questionable countries. The problem is, what exactly is a morally questionable country—can there be one or are we talking about particular people, such as the leaders of the country who are morally questionable? And which moral values and principles are relevant to be applied?

Full, airtight dictatorship, especially of the giant post-office type of Lenin’s socialism where private enterprise did not exist, is often cited as an immoral country that one should not have traded with. The government owned and controlled everything, including you, so the system was totalitarian. The fascist Nazi Germany, although it had nominally private businesses, was also totalitarian; it controlled everything and everyone. In an airtight dictatorship, everyone is prisoner and slave and all external trade must be conducted with the party bureaucrats, the slave masters.**

In today’s world, countries without private-sector workforces are rare. China may have over 70% of its employment in private enterprises and even Cuba may now have over 20% of its workers in the private sector.

Justice is the relevant principle in judging the morality of international trade. As Ayn Rand stated, “the principle of justice…is the principle of trade,” and includes not treating other people as “masters or slaves, but as independent equals.” The prisoners of airtight dictatorships were slaves and the bureaucrats were their masters, but private enterprisers in many countries today enjoy a modicum of freedom and independence.

Doing business in China can illustrate the complexity of ethics in the international arena.

Ethnic Chinese in particular are known to be entrepreneurial and hard-working, whether at home on the mainland or as a minority in other Asian countries. On the mainland their economy has shown the fruits of their efforts. (Less than 7% of the Chinese population are members of the Communist Party, leaving a large number of people to trade with.)


Economic reform in China under Deng Xiaoping (1978-89) was indeed impressive: de-collectivization of farms, acceptance of foreign investment, allowing citizens to own businesses, privatization of state-owned businesses, and the elimination of price controls and other regulations. Unfortunately, subsequent leaders have sought to limit this reform, though the economy still thrives in all areas of the country.

Also, recent accusations of Chinese genocide should be made more precise. There is no evidence of mass extermination, the correct definition of genocide, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. There is forced labor and forced sterilization, actions the United States was guilty of in the twentieth century with the military draft and the progressives’ eugenic goal of keeping the “feeble minded” from procreating.

But mixing forced labor and forced sterilization with execution to call China’s actions genocide is tantamount to calling the slums of Harlem and Watts ghettos; slums are not ethnic prisons. The definition of genocide being used today comes from the United Nations, which is more broad, going beyond killing, allowing lesser crimes into the definition. The UN itself, incidentally, is a massive governmental organization (hostile to the US) and not exactly an expert on concept formation and definition.

Attempted destruction of an ethnic minority’s culture? This is an accurate description of the actions of a large number of Chinese leaders and bureaucrats, but there is a difference between physical destruction of a group—think Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, and Tutsis—and forcing that group to integrate culturally into the majority. Still horrible, but not genocide.

Free trade is said to be the primary foreign policy of free societies; therefore, trade with private parties, not bureaucrats, should be the corollary. And the line attributed to Frederic Bastiat—“if goods don’t cross borders, armies will”—is also relevant here, but that would take us into economics and away from ethics.

Doing business in authoritarian countries poses additional questions and challenges. Are you really dealing with, and selling your products to, private citizens or with the jailers and killers? How do you know whether your products are made by (semi-) free citizens or by forced labor? Analogous questions can be asked about doing business in (semi-) free countries, such as the United States: how do you know your products are not being bought by criminals and the Mafia?

Facts do matter—a lot of them—especially when trying to decide whether doing business in certain countries is moral.

And judging other people is not an easy task, as the above examples indicate. Digging for facts is the first and persistently enduring action throughout the process required before making moral judgments in business. Time is your friend. Don’t jump to immediate conclusions.


* In contrast, I observed two brothers who owned their company; their desks were up against each other’s in an open office. They seemed to get along well.

** “Airtight” was the working title of Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living. The background of the novel is life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Rand’s heroine shouts at her communist antagonist (p. 385): “You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst!” I’ve written before about our recent covid totalitarianism as a taste of airtightness.

But, again, it is necessary to understand the complexity of judging: there are bureaucrats who have their critics cancelled, jailed, or shot and others who may even help some of the slaves to escape. Bureaucracy is a huge continuum from evil to decent. (And yours truly was a “super bureaucrat” for thirty years in two government-run universities; he thinks he was on the decent end of the continuum!)