HON-H 300 – Cultural Norms and Peace Building Through Business

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek once argued that the key to global morality is international trade. In The Fatal Conceit, he argued that we are able to better satisfy our wants by promise-keeping, truth-telling, and delivering high quality goods and services rather than by killing and stealing. These “virtues” promote trust, which encourage repeated trade which in turn leads to more sophisticated trading relationships. Thus for Hayek, trade is the best mechanism for global ethics.

Hayek’s theory does not address the non-material wants we have, and it is hardly an adequate ethical epistemology. But he is certainly onto an important insight that through our relationships and our interactions with others, we learn moral values. Relationships are sustained by commitments to those moral values; without ethical practices, relationships suffer and often terminate. To enhance that which we and our partner value in common, we develop certain norms that we call “virtues.” We will also examine the now burgeoning literature on the ways in which various cultural artifacts, including business, sports, film, religion, and music can foster peace.

Business may also provide a way for individuals and cultures of great diversity to learn to converse about the things they commonly value. To do so, and to understand the foundations for different cultures’ understanding of ethics, we will survey six major spiritual traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucian/Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While the United States conducts a good deal of its public discourse in secular terms, global discourse has a richer flavor of religious belief to it. It is important to listen to those beliefs of how Hindus, Muslims, and others view economics and business.

If one does not understand another’s (sometimes one’s own) religion or spirituality, one is prone to caricaturize it and once caricaturized, it is much easier to kill a misunderstood person. Corporations practicing the kinds of virtues that lead to peace are also exactly the kinds of organizations that also provide a forum for individuals of different beliefs to work together by either finding a common ground or, if no common ground exists, to still find ways to frame differences in constructive terms of diversity rather than in threatening poses that trigger defensiveness.

Finally, the class will explore some cultural bridges that can also connect cultures, such as sports, music, and film. Sports provides a great window into the ways in which we ethically (and spiritually) grow. Music appeals to our emotions and is idiosyncratic to individuals and cultures. It has also been called the universal language and so it provides a capstone to our inquiry. Film, of course, serves as a cultural foundation for peace as do music and sports, but it also has the capability of being the conveyor of sports and music experiences. In this course, we want to examine these cultural touchstones, recognizing the high stakes that are involved in them and to leave the course with a better understanding of the cultural norms that inform culture and that also provide ways for cultures to find common ground, especially in business.