Top Ethics Concerns for Businesses Today (w/ Dr. Elisabeth Kincaid)

On this episode, Christian ethicist Dr. Elisabeth Kincaid shares some of her top ethics and morality concerns for business leaders today.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast, where Christ-following business leaders explore God's will and ways for business. This show is the ministry of the Center for Christianity and Business at Houston Christian University and features conversations with today's Christ-centered business leaders who are representing Christ faithfully in the business world. I'm your host, Darren Scheer, and if you want to make your work, leadership and company's culture more Christ-centered, you've come to the right place. On this episode, we're joined by Elizabeth Kincaid. Elizabeth is Associate Professor of Ethics, Faith, and Culture at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary. She also serves as the director of the Institute of Faith and Learning, where she works to develop programming that integrates Christian faith and academic excellence. And is also an affiliate professor of management at the OnCommer, I shouldn't know how to say this.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

And Camera.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

And Camera School of Business there at Baylor. And she focuses on the intersection of theological ethics, legal ethics, business ethics, virtue ethics, natural law, all sorts of good stuff. And Dr. Kincaid recently published Law from Below: How the Thought of Francisco Suarez can renew contemporary legal engagement, which explores different models for Christian engagement with law. Elizabeth, welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Thanks so much, Darren. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

So you're an academic, a very accomplished academic, but also you have a background in law as a criminal defense attorney in a large law firm. When did you first realize God wants to be involved in your work in business?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Darren, that's a great question. And I think for me, this has been a gradual revelation. So I grew up in the church. I grew up in a wonderful Christian family. So I always knew that it was really important that my faith influence what I did. But I think my vision of how my faith influenced what I did was, you know, go to work, be a nice person, don't do anything unethical, spread the gospel when you can, kind of that type of approach. And when I was a baby lawyer, I had a sense that I wanted something more. So I got online, I Googled Dallas Church Mission Trip to India and happened to find out about a mission trip going to India with a group called International Justice Mission. And went on that trip and just seeing how the lawyers in India that we interacted with saw their faith transforming both how they did their work and what type of work they were doing, um really deeply impacted me and sent me on this whole kind of journal journey of discovery as to what it means to have my faith inform my work. I actually also worked in finance for a while. So spent some time, a lot of time thinking about that. That's where my business ethics interest came from. But to say not only what does it mean to be a Christian and kind of how I show up at work, but what work should I be doing?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

I JM such a great, such a great ministry. And so as a lawyer, did you did you see kind of the the negative underbelly of what goes on in the legal world that kind of out of necessity you just said, I've I've gotta I've gotta do something about this. Is that part of what uh motivated you to pursue a PhD in moral theology and Christian ethics?

SPEAKER_00 4:02

So I will say I worked with an amazing firm. I worked with great lawyers who were really wonderful exemplars. Um, I was not a great lawyer. I don't think I was a very good litigator, but um I felt that the people I worked with were really morally outstanding. Um but when you're doing white-collar criminal defense work, and especially when you're a baby lawyer, you spend a lot of time reading people's emails and reading their documents. So one of the things that really impacted me through being involved in these discovery processes in large litigations is to say, well, what happened to these people that they, you know, people I never met. I was just reading their emails, um, that they ended up making these choices. What was going on in their own lives that kind of led them into these situations where they're the target of a federal investigation? So seeing that really made me start asking these questions. And I actually went on staff with Innervarsity Christian Fellowship doing graduate and faculty ministry at SMU. And because I wanted to support law students and business students, folks thinking about going into these fields and asking a lot of these questions. How do I live out my faith? What type of work should I be doing? And realized that there's so many resources in the Christian tradition to answer these questions and wanted to spend more time engaging with those resources. So that's how I went to get a PhD. It was very accidental. I never thought I would be going into the academy.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Yeah. Wow. What a unique perspective. Uh, and so you are were you primarily def you were defending these um accused white-collar criminals? Like what I know there's attorney-client privilege, but like what are some of the scenarios and and just behaviors that you were seeing uh that that just helped you to recognize that we've really got to do a better job of discipling business people.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

So what I saw then and what I've seen continuing in my research around these questions, kind of ethical failures, and I'm now focusing uh doing at least some of my research is focusing on ethical failures in churches, which are also businesses, um, is that people don't wake up in the morning and think, or very few people wake up in the morning and think, gosh, I'm gonna defraud my business, or I'm gonna defraud my church, or I'm going to enter into an unethical relationship. That this is a gradual step. People take one step into a moral gray area, they take another one, they get deeper and deeper, and before they know it, they've ended up in a place they never thought they would be. I really do believe very strongly that we have the capacity to kind of gradually deaden our consciences, and we don't even see that about ourselves. We don't see that going on in our own life. So, in a sense, I think I've developed a very Augustinian sense of sinfulness that people really are very good at lying to ourselves and we don't see our own moral failure as it happens.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Yeah. Is there a story you could tell? Um, you know, with obviously the names changed to detect the guilty?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

So I yeah, I came one of the things that was really interesting is um, and this was kind of later on in legal practice, not at the form I first worked at, um, came across a case where people are working for a large multinational corporation, and basically they are um involved in bribing their business kind of there's there's a bribery scandal going on with business partners in a different part of the developing world. And it was really interesting reading the emails between these American business people, and I don't know if they were people of faith or not, that doesn't come up in their emails, where you see the different ways they're using to justify this behavior. And it's behavior I think that any of us would say, gosh, I mean, I would never bribe someone. I mean, that's completely contrary to my moral values. But you would see excuses like, well, this is just the way they do this in their culture, or ways of trying to pad the payments so it doesn't look like a bribe, or making excuses based on the pressure from the company to justify, well, you know, we're, we're, we have to make these shortcuts because of the way the corporate policy is being set up that makes this so challenging. So kind of the immense creativity in moral justification is kind of stunning. And you see this when you look at, I mean, situations in the church too, where you re read interview with people, for example, who are embezzling from their church. Um the, you know, types of excuses are things like, well, I'm not being paid enough. So this is owed to me. Oh, these people really wanted to give me this money. Um, this is like we're just endlessly capable of justifying our own moral failings.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Yeah. So a lot of a lot of bribery and embezzlement type issues going on.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah. I mean, I think that that those are the very easy and obvious ones that pop up. I mean, let ones that are perhaps less easy to see from the outside, but you do start to see are things like workplace bullying, um, the way that a person's tone, they may not even see it about themselves, but comes across. Um, and that can also be kind of a cumulative process of um yeah, taking little steps, little steps, little steps.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Ending up as a workplace bully.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Yeah, my wife and I were just talking about this the other day, uh, this issue of bribery, because uh I haven't mentioned this to our listeners, but I finally decided I'm gonna finish my MBA. I've got five courses left and I'm taking international business right now. And of course, bribery is a is an issue that comes up. Um, but I was thinking about the the way that we have the practice of tipping in the United States, where if you were to go into a restaurant and tell your server when you sit down, I'm I'm not gonna be tipping today. Um, you're probably not gonna get great service, right? And yet the the the tip is not, well, in some some restaurants it is where it's you know, they press that magic button as the servers call it, and you you're you know, you've got that automatic gratuity on there. But in most cases, it's gonna be up to the customer to decide what that uh what that's gonna be. And and it seems like in a lot of countries they consider bribery as sort of like tipping, you know, or or gifting, you know, which you could you could get away with in those countries, but not under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Exactly. So and I think this is where, look, and this is a bigger question for Christians, um, we are always asking ourselves, you know, like thankfully, I would say thankfully, we have some clear guidance from the United States government about boundaries, unacceptable boundaries and operating outside the US, um, which doesn't envision tipping. But we're always asking ourselves, what in kind of other cultures that we're coming into from the outside, like what like actually is bribery? I mean, what is any act that we think we can identify as morally wrong? Kind of the specifications of that act. And how do we engage respectfully with that culture, not having an idea of, well, gosh, I obviously know what this is because as an American, I've I have this, you know, perfect moral sense. Um, or, but also say, well, maybe, maybe there is something wrong here. So I think that's a real challenge. This comes up a lot in kind of Christian NGO discussions around development as well. What when when are you, when is what might seem a bribe to us really just quote, you know, kind of fee for doing business? And when is it a bribe? When is it a gift? And I think it requires us to be very um intentionally culturally aware.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yeah. Well, and of course, the Bible teaches us that bribery is one of the things that the Lord detests. And and I was, as my wife and I were talking about this, I was trying to think is there a a biblical example of bribery where this is just unmistakable, this is not tipping, this is not a gift, this is this is the kind of bribery that is abhorrent to God and should be abortion to us. Like, I I couldn't think of an example.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

You know, I we know that Jesus says to the Roman soldiers, don't accept bribes when he's talking, I don't remember exactly where. Um, like don't, oh gosh, now I said that. I'm going aside in the Pauline epistles. But I mean, there it there is a a New Testament prohibition specifically to soldiers, like, don't take bribes, don't use your power to extort from other people. And but it's interesting that the person being told to do that is the person with power. It's the person receiving the bribe, not the person giving the bribe.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

And so there's a sense there that maybe s oftentimes when people are in that culture paying a bribe, it's out of a position of powerlessness.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Right. Yeah. And it's it's it's more akin to extortion than it would be to tipping or I think that's gifting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah. Well, good, good. It's it's a fascinating topic. Elizabeth, what's a story of a time when you saw God's hand at work in business uh or in the workplace with you work with a lot of nonprofits and churches as well?

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Sure. Um, so I will say one kind of beautiful experience that happened to me is um when I worked in finance, the uh company we were working for um got shot down of over some uh criminal allegations, not connected to me. Um and the advan what what happened during, I mean it's a very traumatic experience, but what happened during that is that a group of folks who were together at that firm, it just really brought us close together. And one of the guys was involved with a Christian nonprofit doing water well drilling in the Sudan. And so all of us, you know, we're out of work. And he got a group together to go to the Sudan. And it was an amazing experience for all of us of just um we we were providing consulting services to some Christian nonprofits, and and we're still very, very close to this day. I mean, this was 15 years ago. And so that was just, and we've all gone on to do things that we we love more than what we were doing then. But it was just this moment of real grace that out of what was a very traumatic, stressful experience, um, God gave us this community and this larger vision as to how we could use our skills to serve. And I think all of us really grew spiritually through that experience. So it was not what any of us were expecting coming out of this job, but it was just this unexpected gift.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Yeah. Wow, I love that. And I love asking that question, hearing the responses because almost every single response, it it starts with describing a time of some sort of a problem, some sort of a crisis that's going on. And God just does so much of his best work in the midst of those crises. I was just thinking about that last night reading, so reading Ruth uh chapter one, where there's a famine and and it it causes this shifting, and and that famine is what really precipitates this powerful story of Ruth and the lineage of of Christ. And and so whatever folks are going through right now, if it's if it feels like a crisis, um, God does so much of his best work, just as you describe, Elizabeth, in the midst of these crises. I wanted to ask you too, Elizabeth, as a moral theologian, kind of circling back uh to some of this um these this ethical uh discussion, uh, and you're a Christian ethicist. I know how to say that because I went to seminary ethicist, um, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. What are some of your top moral concerns about business today?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

So I think my probably my top moral concern is a pretty overarching moral concern. And when I was talking about what I've seen of business ethics failures and this sense that for most people, this is one little step, one little step, one little step. Um I worry that we live in a world where business is so big and things are happening at such a fast pace, um, geopolitically, technologically, this is the development of AI, um, that we as Christians feel that we don't have agency and that we don't have time to evaluate what's going on. So it is very easy for us to get swept up in the kind of constant sense of crisis that we can live with, this constant sense of change and go along with the flow. Um, and that in a sense, the way that business is consistently developing, kind of calling for this constant innovation contributes to that. And so it makes it very hard for us as Christians to stop, step back, ask hard questions, say, do I really want to be in this situation? Ought I to be in this situation, and that doesn't mean just situations of kind of direct moral choice, but a a larger situation of like, is this the type of business I should be in? Because we don't feel like we have the time or the moral agency to evaluate. And I feel that in my own life. I see that for my friends in their careers, and I think I see this um more broadly in the church as well. And it it it means that we're missing opportunities to grow and be more like Christ.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Yeah. Can you give us a specific example of how you see this playing out?

SPEAKER_00 20:33

I see this in a lot of the discussions around AI. Um and I'm not, I'm not good at technology, but I'm not kind of a technophobe on principle. But I think that it is very because the AI innovation seems like it's happening so fast and it is being perceived as being so necessary to what people do now, it is much harder for kind of Christian, Christians who, unlike me, don't have the luxury of sitting around and kind of trying to write thank pieces to just stop and say, hey, is this a good? How is this a good? What should we be using this for? Um, it that feels like it's going very, very quickly. I think another, and this is a broader cultural issue that a lot of people have diagnosed, um, is that we are so captive to a 24-hour news cycle, and we are so siloed into our different kind of political persuasions that we can feel almost like we're on a roller coaster, like this is happening now, this is happening, and this is happening. I always need to be, I always need to be in this position of kind of being on defense, and we can't stop and Say, well, wait, what should I as a business person be doing in the face of this? What's kind of the broader perspective? I mean, really, what's God's perspective? And it's very hard to um kind of break away from the momentum of whatever cultural stream we're tied into.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah. Yeah, that AI is a is a massive issue. And I know you're in the uh academy as well, where it become can become a real problem with students. I'm I'm just back into the university after 15 years of being out. Of course, Chat GPT wasn't around back then. Um and and so we get our first assignment is this discussion post. And and I go on there and I'm like, man, a lot of these this posts that people are putting up there really sound like AI generated. And so I copy and paste, and I find that 75% of these posts were at least 95% AI generated. And and I don't know if that and I and I noticed it because we're submitting like group assignments, and so one of these guys is in my group, and I'm like, bro, um I don't I they I think I haven't been around here in a while, but I think they have like checkers that can flag this kind of stuff, and I don't think this is really consistent with the school's policy. And he's like, Oh, well, you know, I'm a I'm a lawyer, and you know, I do this just in the course part of my everyday workflow to generate legal documents this way. So it's like this is not only impacting the academic world, but I mean, if you're hiring attorneys nowadays, like you're hiring the entity.

unknown 23:56

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Well, I mean, I this comes up a lot for me teaching business ethics, is I tell my students you can't use anything that's AI generated, which doesn't mean there might not be situations in your work where you should use AI. But I was like, this class is about you learning how to engage in ethical reflection. And if you're using AI to do your ethical reflection for you, you've just outsourced your moral life to a machine. And that should be pretty terrifying. We've all seen the matrix. Um, I saw it pretty, I've seen it pretty repeatedly. Actually, one point I had a student who copied two paragraphs from Encyclopedia Britannica, and I almost was relieved.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

I was like, at least Yeah, that's Brit, that's taking it back right there. And Carta.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

So um, yeah, what what else are you concerned about? What else do we need to be concerned about from uh a Christian ethics perspective in the marketplace today?

SPEAKER_00 24:53

I so a book that's impacted me a lot is a book by another moral theologian named William Kavanaugh called Being Consumed. And this is one of the things uh kind of kind of Kavanaugh's theory is that we are not sufficiently aware as to how much we are commodified in our kind of system of buying and selling. And obviously, this comes up a lot with talking about data being sold um through the internet. It comes up in discussion of how much our media consumption is actually tied to marketing and to people trying to get us to buy something. Um, and it's so our consumption of marketing is so in the background of everything that we do that we're not stopping to say, how much are my desires being formed, not by the gospel, not by scripture, not by the church, but rather by this endless cycle of consumption that we are presented with. And I think that makes it very hard to evaluate our own lifestyle choices, to evaluate what we're spending money on, to evaluate what our work is doing, to evaluate what our business is doing. And so again, I worry a lot about not having space for reflection and asking, well, where are these desires actually coming from? Are these my own desires? Are these desires that reflect maybe needs that I actually have, or is this these desires that have been created by this kind of constant cycle of consumption? And I see this in myself a lot. Um, it's really interesting being a parent of young children and being somebody who thinks about consumption and business ethics professionally. Um, I can have all of these kind of high and mighty ideas about how we need to question our desires. And then as soon as I get into planning a kid's birthday party or thinking about children's sports, um, I instantly realize wait, this is a script I've been fed as to what is a good parent I should be giving my children. And I'm not sure this actually is what I should be giving my children.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Yeah, that's right. And and I think the the flip side of that is that we can be positively influenced in that way, you know, because we are fundamentally disciples. Right. And we are all in the marketplace, is the primary place people are being discipled because that's where we spend most of our time and that's where most of our inputs come from. Absolutely. And so that's the responsibility and the opportunity we have as Christian business professionals, Christian business leaders to influence the world around us. Um, and and and it's gonna require, like you've been saying, to really pump the brakes on like, whoa, whoa, is this am I being discipled right now by the pattern of this world and the spirit of the age, which is ever changing by definition, or am I being discipled by Christ and what his values are?

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Absolutely. And I think, I mean, like you said, the positive flip side is I said, I worry about us feeling like we don't have agency, we don't have power, we're caught in this kind of cycle we can't get out of. But if we do name that agency, if we're aware of it, if we're aware of having this tremendous power, there are so many opportunities as to how business can be used really for the greater glory of God.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Yeah, that's right. And it's it's been fascinating to me to kind of trace back the study of business and and economics to the study of moral theology. Um, and and I'm sure that, and I haven't really heard anyone talk about this, but I'm sure you could really nerd out on this idea, you know, going back to Adam Smith and even before that, because that's what a lot of can you just speak on that for a bit?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

I mean, I when you look at really let's go back to kind of the early church fathers. Um when you look at Augustine or Basil or um Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory and Alsian's the Cappadocians, you see that one of the things they are constantly thinking about is how Christians should use money and power. And there is a strong sense um of responsibility and possibilities for good use. And these are there, there's a um an awareness that we have we answer to God for how we use the things of this world. So you see when you when you go back and read their sermons or their letters, like this is what they're talking to people about. Um, and so when you you know fast forward far into the Middle Ages, where I do a fair amount of my research on Thomas Aquinas, um, one of the things that Aquinas is very interested in, and this is way in the background of someone like Adam Smith, is to say everything I have belongs to God, but God is also entrusted. I'm because I have owned something, um, I've been entrusted with responsibility for it. And how am I developing what I have been given to use for the common good? So we have this strong sense of a connection between the use of resources and benefiting the community that God has put you in. Um, we a lot of the early reflections on finance and kind of appropriate uses of lending money all are done by theologians. They're saying, because the church had a drawing on the Old Testament, was very worried about usury lending money at interest. And then, as kind of financial models started to develop, a Christians had to say, okay, well, what's disobedient to God's plan? What's extortion? What is using loans to control people? We were talking about bribes to control people earlier, and what might be an opportunity for productive use of money in line with God, with what God is calling us to? And so this just comes up repeatedly in the tradition. And I think we can some of it's not translated, so we don't run into it that way. And a lot of it is we're just not thinking about the development of business and and the development of law as Christian stories. And they really are.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Well, there's so much more we can learn from you, Elizabeth. Uh, elizabethkincade.com is your website, and that's Elizabeth with with an S and a K in Kinkade. Um, and she's a professor at Baylor, so you can check her out at Baylor.edu. Anything else you want to say about um want to encourage people to get a hold of your book, Law from Below, um, how the thought of uh Francisco Suarez can renew contemporary legal engagement. Um, what else do you want to do?

SPEAKER_00 32:42

I would encourage folks. You and I got connected um through a friend, mutual friend of ours at Calvin, Jason Stainsbury, who just put out a journal that is free online, the Journal of Religion and Business Ethics, a great edition about shalom and how business can contribute to God's peace. And there's some wonderful journal articles in that by some great scholars about things like marketing, which we've been talking about a lot. Um, Sabbath, I wrote on Sabbath, um, kind of economics and entrepreneurship contributing to Shalom. So would encourage folks to check that out too. It's the Journal of Religion and Business Ethics.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

All right. We'll have a link to that in the show notes as well. And Elizabeth, thank you so much for the work you're doing in the academy and discipling business people, discipling students, and helping us to uh just be more thoughtful about applying our Christian faith to these um really critical ethical decisions we have to make every day.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Love the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Christian Business Leader Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and tune in for the next episode as we continue exploring God's will and ways for business.