The Contradiction of Ethics Only When We Can Afford It

In prosperous times, diversity, fairness and inclusion appear prominently on corporate websites and recruitment pages. Training is organized, departments are established and executives mention them in speeches. Yet when the economy begins to weaken, these initiatives become targets for reduction with surprising speed. Somehow the same items always appear near the top of the budget-cutting list.

This is hardly new. A company concentrating on its core business in a recession and shedding measures it regards as peripheral can look like a reasonable management decision. Behavioral economics has repeatedly suggested that perceived scarcity narrows attention toward choices concerned with short-term survival. For individuals and organizations alike, a lack of room to manoeuvre can narrow the field of vision.

The problem is that the first things discarded within that narrowed view are often those least visible in numbers. What can be measured quarterly, such as sales and deadlines, remains. Fair evaluation systems and consideration for people who struggle to speak up, whose effects emerge over longer periods, are cut first. Ethical initiatives may retreat less because they were unnecessary than because they were always overshadowed by readily measured results.

From a marketing perspective, the pattern becomes more explicit. During good times, diversity has often been treated as something to display: recruitment imagery, annual reports and social media posts. It is hard to deny that it has sometimes been consumed as attention-grabbing material, a demonstration of comfortable resources. If so, its disappearance in a downturn follows naturally. What was hung up as decoration is taken down when there is no longer room to decorate.

Not every company behaves alike. Some small businesses and startups embed fairness in everyday recruitment and evaluation decisions instead of presenting it as a grand initiative. Without a signboard, there is nothing to take down in a recession. Such moments quietly test whether ethics has taken root as a habit of decision-making rather than simply as a formal program.

AI adoption makes this more complex. Delegating hiring and evaluation to algorithms in the name of cost reduction can, ironically, make arbitrary retreat from ethical standards harder, because criteria are made explicit and records remain. But if bias is built into those criteria, the same problems are merely reproduced invisibly. How AI is used ultimately mirrors the priorities of those who design and operate it.

Saying that corporate ethics retreats in a downturn is half true and half an excuse. The real question is where ethics stood during prosperity. Was it inside core decisions, or displayed as attractive decoration and a sign of abundance? A recession may give us a chance to examine that distinction.