From the Editor’s Desk: The Supreme Self

Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, war profiteer, and Nazi Party member, saved more than a thousand Jews from the concentration camps. He went into financial ruin afterward for standing up to the immoral arc of history. There was no incentive, that fancy little word, to compel his act. Schindler’s kind of morality—the visceral morality that drives one to not only leverage but sacrifice one’s own station for the greater good—is not only often incidental but opposed to the incentives of success in business. Success depends on managing downside and maximizing upside. How many besides Schindler does the world know in the field of business, then, on his side of the ledger? 

Few. Mostly for environmental reasons. After all, extreme scenarios like his are far from what your average businessperson faces in their career. But with regards to moral seriousness, should we prepare for the extreme or the everyday? There is a strong case for the former. To have nothing in hand when the slippery slope to hell confronts a generation is to be morally bankrupt.

Can it be taught at the business school? Conversations with friends, classmates, and professors have convinced me that even if the administration replaced the EC curriculum with an entire year of strenuous engagement with philosophy, ethics, and foundational religious and civilizational texts, no amount of imposed moral education would change our fundamental nature at this stage in life. We sought out Harvard to advance our careers. Our selves, with society as beneficiary. We came to play some part in that ingenious, unintentional economic design that yokes self interest to the public interest. No one came here to hole up in the ivory tower across the river, which prides itself on developing a totalizing, corrosive, judgmental morality—yet the same morality that begot Schindler’s act. There, in the academy of business, is room to sand the edges of our nature.

What is the good administrator’s current recourse? Leadership and Corporate Accountability? Moral standing in business is couched and hedged, always, in these phrases: doing good does not have to exclude doing well; doing good means knowing your principles; doing good means following the law, their frameworks, and satisfying their every counterparty; doing good means creating shared prosperity. Who can argue with that? Morality, we say, is important; but everyone has their own morals, and we shan’t dare to tell you that anything is truly wrong to an objectively certain degree. There is only the subjective. We shall debate whether insider trading is good or bad.

We are taught to recognize a quotidian shape of the moral problem. There is nothing in the modern business school beyond an appeal to the supremacy of self—just the question of “What would you do?” to commence a debate with little settled conclusion. In none of these tellings does doing good mean sacrificing your lot for the lot of others. In none of these tellings is there the teaching of sacrifice, even and especially in the dark, as moral power. There should be.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.