Reclaiming Lost Grounds in Businesses
Oh how the mighty has fallen, Enron, WorldCom and the list may well go on. It is not only the mighty that has fallen, but also our stocks' value, including Singapore's company. When it all voice down to, it is our pocket books that really hurt. It is at this time that many seem to be awakening. How could they (allegedly the management teams of these corporations) do this?
Chuck Colson, in an article published in BreakPoint (8th July), pointed out that "We're captive to this culture of relativism. There's no truth, so who are we to impose our values on anyone else? All anybody can do - like a business school teacher - is help people think through problems and arrive at their own conclusions while telling them that no conclusion is any better than any other - a formula for disaster."
However, it is also this disaster that we begin to find opportunity to bring truth back into a confused world. Colson continues, "But this is an opportunity for Christians to make an apologetic case that a free society can't survive without standards of virtue. And those standards have always been informed by Christian truth. The secular elites and a lot of our neighbours tell us we shouldn't be imposing our views on others - okay. But until we recover a sense of absolute moral truth, we're going to continue to see scandals, and we'll also see our portfolios decline. I wonder if the people will be so eager to dismiss us as "religious bigots" when they realize that it's the lack of ethics in our society caused by the abandonment of a Judeo-Christian consensus that's causing them to lose their retirement plans. This ethical crisis poses a direct threat to the millions of Americans who directly or indirectly own stock."
One of the fundamental datum in life that needs to be reclaimed today is the conviction that there is an absolute truth that exists. The question is, are we able to make a reasonable defense of the existence of this datum. C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity proposes that in arguments between people that happen daily, there is an implicit reference to a 'Natural Law', encompassing also morality. By the question "How can they do that?" when cases like Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen happens, it naturally refers also to a 'Natural Law' written beyond the penal codes. Like laws of physics or chemistry, laws governing morality are discovered because they serve the 'common good' and described in human language, not comprehensive but nevertheless, the best tool available to us.
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