The recent People Management article, “Codes of ethics: does every company need one?” raised a number of interesting questions.

The article revealed that only 54% of FTSE 250 have published codes of ethics, according to research by the Institute of Business Ethics. Of these only 57% are considered as “good”.

As Ms McConville, my English teacher at school in Newry, used to regularly ask in her efforts to coax more lucid writing from even her most inarticulate pupils, “What does ‘good’ even mean?”

Milton Friedman would have said that “good” meant making a profit for shareholders within the law. This is a moral perspective that is still widely prevalent in government and business. I have met more than one business executive who has been admiring of such guidance as an amoral underpinning to their strategic approaches. But such amorality is also wholly inadequate for dealing with the existential challenges facing humanity in the 21^st Century. Each of those challenges – from climate change to contemporary slavery – is already a product of thousands of business and political leaders thinking that such things are somebody else’s problem.

The People Management article quotes Ian Peters, director of the Institute of Business Ethics, with another perspective on “good”. He says, “A code of ethics should be the cornerstone for any organisation, ensuring it’s doing the right thing for the right reasons.”

This organisational focus on ethics is one that I am strongly in agreement with, though this also begs the question, “What is ‘right’?” It is further striking that others quoted in the article instead emphasise only personal conduct in the workplace and whistle-blowing duties and protections.

These are, of course, important issues. No one should have to endure fear and bullying in any workplace. But in my view ethics is a yet more fundamental thing. It is, at heart, a strategic question and, consequently a leadership one.

In my book, Ethical Leadership: moral decision making under pressure, I define ethical leadership as the effort “to optimize life-affirming choices that seek to protect human rights and advance ecological restoration irrespective of how inhospitable the political, social or professional environment.”

Sometimes this requires dissent or “whistle-blowing”: protest is often, after all, just another name for leadership.

But ethical leadership is also about strategic choice making. For example, a business executive who, decides to source from a textile, electronics or fisheries supply chain in Asia or Africa that they know to be highly destructive of the environment and rife with exploitative labour practices, will often be behaving completely legally. They may also be acting in the spirit of a code of conduct that emphasises legal compliance. But there is, nevertheless, the sulphurous whiff of the banality of evil in such choices.

A recent leading article in the Economist reported that researchers estimate a 5% risk that the current development of Artificial Intelligence systems may result in something “extremely bad (eg, human extinction).” So, I for one am concerned that the executives leading the development of this technology are thinking about ethical standards beyond mere compliance with law, particularly given that so much of the necessary law to constrain dangerous AI development does not yet exist.

Perhaps they are actively thinking about these risks. But as some of them at least also seem untroubled with the manipulation of information systems that was a major factor in instigating the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar in 2016, I would not want to bet my life on it.

But, like the rest of us, I may be forced to. The current precariousness of continued human existence on this planet is a result of so many political and business leaders not looking beyond the short-term questions of immediate profit rather than the long-term question of sustainability or, for that matter, human survival.

For humanity to have a chance requires now that business executives and politicians focus on promoting choices that protect human rights and restore the environment, not just those that comply with the law and obtain short-term financial gains.

So, all businesses, indeed all leaders, need ethical codes of conduct that will compel them to make life-affirming choices the core of their business and economic strategies.