Our Code of Ethics

This organisation is committed to high ethical standards. Both as a group and as individuals, we are committed to:

• Treating people connected with our organisation compassionately—including customers, suppliers, co-workers, funders/owners, and the wider community.
• Acting responsibly and being accountable for what we do.
• Treating people connected with our organisation fairly.
• Treating people in ways that respect their rights.
• Having integrity and honesty.
• Looking for ways to work together to achieve valuable ends.
• Never losing sight of our organisation’s social purpose.

These standards are wide enough to encompass activities in many different sectors covering relationships with customers, suppliers, co-workers, funders/owners and the wider community. Below are brief explanations of these standards.

Compassion involves concern for the welfare and feelings of others. Compassion often leads to action, for example in helping others avoid harm or recover from a harm that has already hit. Admittedly, some jobs foreseeably involve doing to some others what they do not like. Examples are imposing punishments, opposing others in legal conflicts, denying to some people a scarce resource because others need or deserve it more, making people redundant, etc. To do such a job compassionately involves avoiding unnecessary harms to others and taking reasonable steps to mitigate harm when it is unavoidable.

To act responsibly is to act in accordance with one’s duties and obligations. Of course these include not only duties to the organisation but also duties to the wider community, including being transparent and open in the provision of appropriate information (i.e. information that is not confidential or sensitive). ‘Being accountable’ includes taking responsibility for what one has done.

Treating people fairly involves treating people in ways that are unaffected by irrelevant differences between them. Differences in religion, race, gender, and cultural background are of course typically irrelevant. Furthermore, fairness requires that people are not required to do what they cannot do and that people get fair warning about any special requirements or constraints they are under while acting for the organisation.

Treating people in ways that respect their rights is here meant to be equivalent to treating people in accord with their inherent dignity, an equal status people have because of their shared membership of the human species. This dignity is crystallized in, and protected by, people’s moral rights. Respect for the moral importance and rights of others cannot be incompatible with recognition of one’s own moral importance and rights. Treating people in ways that respect their rights also requires respecting the need people have for a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

Honesty of course requires avoidance of lying. Integrity involves reliability about doing what one believes to be right, consistently holding oneself to high moral standards. It also involves reliability about not pretending to believe something one doesn’t believe or pretending to have expertise in an area where one lacks it.

Normally, people can improve their own prospects or the prospects of others best by working cooperatively. The vast majority of humanity’s biggest contributions to aggregate well-being would not have been possible without extensive collaboration. However, just as openness is sometimes wrong, there are situations in which cooperation is morally and legally unacceptable in a market economy. Price fixing and other anti-competitive business practices are examples of unacceptable cooperation.

An ethical business recognises that increasing individual wealth (either in terms of salaries or shareholder dividends) and satisfying consumer demand cannot be the sole motivating forces in an organisation. In addition, an organisation needs to have a social purpose in identifying and helping to deliver relevant social goods. Different organisations may have different specific social purposes (e.g. a small local producer might identify the social need to improve local employability skills or their local environment as part of their social purpose, while a multinational energy producer might have an aim of reducing global carbon emission levels, or a large corporate financial services provider might focus on the need to improve the financial literacy of citizens). Nevertheless, at the most general level, the relationship between an organisation and the society it serves should be grounded on meeting the obligations imposed by recognition of social purpose (e.g. in terms of respecting the spirit, not just the letter, of reasonable taxation systems, dealing promptly and efficiently with suppliers and customers, etc).