Chapter 14: Ethics of Recognition: I / you (thou) / they

One of the Netherlands’ major insurance companies has, now for more than a year, had an ethics committee composed of the CEO, the head of the Legal Department, a representative of the Works Council, the Director of Life Insurance, a senior staff member for corporate strategy and ethics, and one external academic member. Many issues brought to the committee really had little or nothing to do with ethics. For instance, inquires were made whether a corporate strategy of “transparency” meant that this or that ought to be done. These questions had not to do with the ethics of “transparency”—for instance, “Is any such principle really adequate to dealing with justice, or with one’s obligations to the insured?”—but had only to do with how the corporate mission was to be understood. The committee sent these requests unanswered back to their originators.