Reference reading
Business Vices
Useful work becomes harder to trust when appearance replaces substance, advantage overrides fair claims, or discomfort is passed to somebody else.
Twenty dispositions that can undermine trustworthy, fair and dependable work. Read the situations, compare the distinctions and consider what a fitting response would change.
Twenty patterns to recognize
- 01
Dishonesty
A readiness to make or preserve a misleading understanding for advantage, convenience or concealment.
- 02
Selfishness
A persistent preference for one's own advantage or convenience over other people's legitimate claims.
- 03
Greed
Excessive desire for gain that persistently overrides fair claims or defensible limits.
- 04
Partiality
Persistent, unjustified favoritism in the weight given to people's claims, evidence or opportunities.
- 05
Envy
Resentment of another's advantage, with a desire to diminish or deny it.
- 06
Vanity
Excessive dependence on admiration and the appearance of importance.
- 07
Arrogance
An inflated sense of one's importance or judgment that discounts correction and other people's standing.
- 08
Domineeringness
A persistent desire to control others that overrides their reasonable agency.
- 09
Servility
Habitual surrender of considered judgment to secure favor or approval.
- 10
Callousness
Habitual indifference to another person's suffering or serious needs.
- 11
Vindictiveness
A habitual disposition to seek payback against someone for a real or perceived injury, slight, embarrassment or challenge.
- 12
Negligence
Habitual disregard for the attention and care one could reasonably give to entrusted concerns.
- 13
Sloth
Habitual avoidance of worthwhile effort that one has a reasonable capacity and responsibility to undertake.
- 14
Complacency
Unwarranted satisfaction with one's adequacy that weakens needed attention or improvement.
- 15
Inconstancy
Habitually abandoning considered purposes or commitments without an adequate reason.
- 16
Impatience
Habitual unwillingness to allow the time or process that a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires.
- 17
Irresolution
A persistent unwillingness to settle a choice when adequate grounds for an appropriate decision are available.
- 18
Rigidity
Habitual unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration.
- 19
Cowardice
Habitual surrender of a considered, defensible purpose to fear when a fitting response was reasonably available.
- 20
Recklessness
Disregard for foreseeable, significant consequences, including risks imposed on other people.
Conduct, character and shared work
A broken promise is an event. Dishonesty, Inconstancy or Negligence may help explain it, but the event alone cannot identify a settled disposition. These readings name recurring tendencies so that the reasoning behind an action can be examined more carefully.
The setting is ordinary business: a counter, a shared room, a workshop, an agreement and the people who depend on them. The same disposition can matter in many roles. Executive Vices is a separate selection concerned with the exercise of leadership and power; a vice shared by both catalogs keeps the same definition.
A name is the beginning of an inquiry, not a verdict on a colleague. Ask what happened, what was reasonably known, whose interests were affected and what alternatives were available. A poor result may reflect an honest mistake, inadequate resources or an unfair arrangement rather than a vice.
Similar appearances, different motives
The two bare chairs may reveal Selfishness: one person’s comfort has been given an unfair priority. Greed concerns the excessive claim to gain; Envy may prefer that another person lose an advantage even when nothing is acquired. Callousness gives insufficient regard to another’s experience. Vindictiveness turns an injury or criticism into a reason to punish.
Several tendencies can shape the same act. Domineeringness can suppress a correction, Arrogance can dismiss it and Vanity can make its public appearance intolerable. Their overlap does not make them interchangeable. The useful distinction is the mechanism each reading invites us to notice.
Likewise, care does not mean endless delay. Irresolution avoids settling a sufficiently informed choice; Recklessness gives too little weight to foreseeable consequences. Thoughtful judgment must consider both what proceeding could cost and what continuing to defer could cost.
A response fitted to the situation
Each article considers a possible repair as well as a distinction. A concealed defect may call for an accurate correction; an unfair allocation for restoring another person’s share; a controlling arrangement for giving people reasonable agency. A polished apology cannot substitute for the change the situation needs.
Personal conduct is only part of business ethics. Incentives, authority, workload, information and procedures can make responsible action easier or harder. Calling a worker cowardly while punishing honest objections conceals the organization’s contribution to the problem.
The illustrations are invented comic situations. They make one choice visible without claiming to reproduce every difficulty of work. Their humor belongs to the self-defeating conduct, not to illness, exhaustion, identity or vulnerability.
Other perspectives
These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has become organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperation of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the individual owning the capital.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source
Writing about industrial relations, Addams contests the idea that an enterprise is simply the owner’s private undertaking. This supplies a necessary limit to a catalog of personal dispositions: organization and participation also deserve examination.
Inquiry was made after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of us were corrected by our fathers; and though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.
Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source
Franklin recalls taking stones for a useful childhood wharf and being corrected by his father. The retrospective story tests the excuse that a beneficial result makes the means acceptable; it is not a claim about modern business outcomes.
Read, compare, reflect
Open any of the twenty readings, compare its neighboring dispositions and consider the questions in relation to a particular decision. The source passages are presented with context so that agreement and disagreement remain possible. The poems and paradoxes offer another angle on the same situation.
This is a reference catalog. It does not enroll a user, record vices, score character or add a second Workbook. Constructive dispositions can be explored in the linked virtue readings.