Encouraging business leaders to maintain high ethical standards and respect the rights of those whose lives are affected by what their companies do is part of the process. If, as some once believed, human nature were perfectible, that is all that would need to be done. The regrettable reality, however, is that there is a darker side to human nature – a tendency toward injustice, as well as a capacity for justice. In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, a book first published more than six decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) observes that our “capacity for justice makes democracy possible” but that our “inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

These competing tendencies are not equally distributed among all individuals. Respect for the rights and well-being of other people was far more pronounced in actor and entrepreneur Paul Newman, who, as noted in Chapter 3, believed that business could be a force for good in society, than in Bernard L. Madoff, who in an elaborate Ponzi scheme swindled tens of thousands of investors of billions of dollars. Conversely, the tendency toward injustice was far more pronounced in Madoff than in Newman.