Ethics in Social Networking and Business 2

9Ethics: Perspectives and the Future

9.1. Introduction

In this book, we have developed some characteristics related to evolution and change in civilizations. They are composed of three main factors: lack of skills, ignorance and greedy attitudes.

We will just remind ourselves that this has been the case for a very long time. We can quote the French essayist and moralist Jean de la Bruyère [DEL 88]: “Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.”

This means that our world is never perfect: according to the changes occurring in our society and our lives, there will always be problems of justice, equality and ethics. To quote de la Bruyère [DEL 96] again, we can say: “life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think”.

Ethics is neither a lyrical subject nor an obsolete subject intended to satisfy skeptics. We must always fight to reduce greed and replace forgotten values, conventional rituals and references by rules of ethical behavior, leaving room for messianic salvation and justice.

As in the Rotary association (with our motto: “serve first”), ethics is always a “life” to build and not a grace to receive.

Ethics is what allows us to increase our space of liberty, our number of possible choices, and ultimately it preserves freedom and peace.

All throughout this book, we have tried to explain why greed is such a societal bankruptcy and why and how ethics is able to overcome ...