Ethics Has Four Letters: Do It!

In the face of many new challenges, the optimistic Professor Stefan Heinemann highlights the future of ethics and encourages everyone to broaden their perspectives and make a change.
 
When did you first consciously come into contact with ethics? And when did you decide to become an ethics professor?

Stefan Heinemann: Like most people, I am sure, moral behavior was formed in my early upbringing. I became very aware of this above all in my own biographical mistakes; I was not born a moral genius. So much for the factual actions. The reflection on this action, my very intensive studies of philosophy and theology certainly also contributed to this, as well as good friends, partnerships, experiences in business life and the academic community.
 
How important is ethical behavior by organizations and companies?

Stefan Heinemann: Business without an ethical foundation is not meant to be and if not succeeds in the long run. In a time in which the poly crisis is perhaps the most long-term thing we have, the responsibility of the economy has come into consciousness again and is in my opinion of central value. Because if it does not succeed to develop clean sustainable and good business models or to further develop where they already exist, fortunately it will be decided in the end by a competition of systems that will not represent progress. Especially since, at the level of the individual company and the individual stakeholder, there is ultimately no way around an ethical classification of the company as part of society. For ethical as well as economic reasons.
  What is your advice to companies that want to develop their ethical behavior further?

Stefan Heinemann: Be brave to invest and see ethics not only as a cost and effort but as a real opportunity to become more attractive to new generations, to become more attractive to today's customers tomorrow and to keep your regulatory risk low. Open your organization to ethical insights instead of having to spend a lot of money on closing the organization to abuse.
 
What benefits could organizations and companies gain from ethical behavior?

Stefan Heinemann: Ethics is self-sufficient, but it works in the world and does so in the economy. Sustainable business is worthwhile from sustainability itself. It is no longer about growth as an end in itself but about responsible profits which every company should have and may have but which are no longer the actual center of activity when it comes to increase. Sustainability of profits is the decisive profit.

What ethical questions and what responsibility do you see among the employees?

Stefan Heinemann: Of course, as a key player in the company, employees have a clear moral responsibility. As managers as well as professionals, and through all hierarchical levels. Because in the end, they are the ones who shape the future. And the exercise of this responsibility in a professional manner is at the same time a safeguard for their own future because this assumption of responsibility is not possible in the long term through algorithms, and even if it were, this would also be ethically problematic.

 
How do you see the upcoming German Supply Chain Act?

Stefan Heinemann: Incidentally, no one can want too much bureaucracy for ethical reasons because it represents waste. However, the voluntary self-administration and self-commitment of the central concerns of the SCDDA has not worked either. It is a correct project; however, it is too late and only for larger enterprises starting from approximately 3000 coworkers, whereby the effect for smaller and medium-size enterprises as suppliers will be naturally noticeable.
Currently, about 900 companies in Germany are thus directly addressed by the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act. From 2024, the legal regulations will be significantly and clearly extended to companies with more than 1,000 employees. This would mean that a total of around 4,800 German companies would then be on board in terms of regulation. Ethically, there is no alternative to such projects.
 
How does the EU support ethics and sustainability in industry, trade and business?

Stefan Heinemann: The EU Sets Frameworks, guidelines and offers lots of possibilities to participate as a stakeholder. The main idea that ethical markets are markets with a competitive advantage on a global scale is right.
 
What other messages or advice do you have for people in the electronics industry?

Stefan Heinemann: Success has four letters: Do it! The electronics industry in particular has so much responsibility because it can and should make a significant contribution to digitization in a sustainable sense with its very heterogeneous companies. In global competition and in the integration into corresponding supply chains, which, as we have been able to learn again in recent years, do not simply go on forever in a relaxed manner, there are many new challenges, but also real opportunities for those who do not close their minds to the topic of sustainability, ethics, human rights and the like, or who somehow try to manage it so that it produces as little trouble as possible, but instead actively put it on the agenda and courageously develop it further.
 
What are you currently most concerned about?

Stefan Heinemann: Obviously, many people like me have also underestimated how strongly power and irrationality still operate in our world. Pandemic war and climate destruction bring us to a point where there are no alternatives but to do the right thing, and that can only mean to manage responsibly and to govern in terms of human rights. From the so important ethical responsibility for following generations becomes even now already an ethics for the living generations also for the older ones among us like myself because also us it will hit all still in lifetime that we notice meanwhile.

We are all together, the last generation which can still tear something around. If we do not do it, it will become infinitely much more difficult if not impossible for all later generations. And there each individual and I do that quite self-critically also, for you personally may ask yourself whether the great decades we had now been not enough to concentrate clearly and responsibly on possibilities and opportunities to enable our children and their children still great decades. In addition, to help all those people who just do not have a great decade but had to live in poverty, hunger, war, and under terrible conditions and must live. I remain an optimist, but it becomes harder for me year by year. The more important is to get new impulses again and again to show that there is hope, which calls reasons.

This interview was held by our media partner ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS.