There are two types of business in the UK today. First, there are those whose aim is simply to survive, who accordingly conduct their affairs by solving their immediate problems as best they can. The view of these organizations is short-term. While not necessarily unethical or environmentally unfriendly, they are not sufficiently vulnerable to public opinion to be concerned about how they proceed in their business affairs-or not so much so that this takes precedence over other concerns. Not all these companies are small: one characteristic response of this sort came from no less a person than the chairman of a well-known multi-national corporation, who in the context of possibly sponsoring a conference on business ethics commented to us last year: "I'm interested, but I'm currently too busy fighting off hostile takeover bids:'

The other type of business has become increasingly sensitive to public opinion. The larger and more prominent a company is (and this again includes many multinationals) the more vulnerable it is to public criticism. As the strategies of these corporation are necessarily long-term, assessing likely future changes in the public's attitude to various issues is of prime importance to them. And as attitudes to particular issues are often tied to a change in political philosophy, many companies pay very careful heed to likely outcomes of any actions they may take. One particular problem affecting multi-nationals in this area is the difficulty of reconciling professed ethical codes with actual practice in the field, especially where different cultures hold different attitudes to labor welfare or marketing.

There has been an information campaign in Britain, conducted both by the media and by specific organizations, that has led to a sharp growth in public awareness of business practices that may appear to be against morality or the public interest. This awareness has led to specific demands for improvement or change which in turn have had economic and political consequences. In their most acute forms, they raise profound constitutional issues, as when the House of Commons Trade Committee recently rebuked the former Trade Secretary for appearing to mislead Parliament (and the EC) over "sweeteners" of £38 million included in a deal to sell off the then-ailing Rover car corporation to British Aerospace.

The key ethical concerns in the UK now seem to be two: freedom and the quality of life. The key principles are two also: citizen choice and official regulation. Sometimes they collaborate, but sometimes they get in each other's way.

"Freedom" is an emotive word, and the perspective on this issue has ranged from the major to the comparatively trivial. After two government prosecutions of individuals for leaking supposed secrets, one main issue under this heading was a call for the revision of Britain's Official Secrets Act, and for fewer "Secrets." We still do not have anything approaching the US Freedom of Information Act, but one very important constitutional battle was won-the jury in one of the cases ruled, despite "official" judicial advice, that the legal touchstone "the public interest" was not automatically identical with the preferences of the government of the day. Similarly, it was the public reaction expressed in jury awards of punitive damages, rather than the official ethical controls of the Press Council, that endorsed the view that celebrities too were citizens entitled to privacy and freedom from undue media harassment.

From the government side, major reforms have been made to the British education system, to provide not only improved education and closer links with business, but more freedom of choice for parents, more control of schools by parent governors, and more control of school budgets by school principals. All three are moves to relocate power to the individual citizen, though by no means all teachers prefer the new system, especially the more direct personal responsibility for budgetary control. Other new regulations mean that the British legal profession is having to abandon some of its restrictive practices, leading again to greater freedom of choice for the client.

Meanwhile, moves from within their own bodies to professionalize engineers and managers, with chartered status and self-regulation, again demonstrate a shift in public opinion towards freedom, this time for groups. On the other hand, recent government proposals to redefine the role of the Probation Service in relation to the judiciary, making the client of a court reporting officer the court rather than the offender, have brought into question both the Service's perception of itself as a professional self-regulating body and its perception of its professional role.

A strange but very deep-rooted dichotomy in British thinking is revealed by this last example. While most people in the UK would argue for more freedom in all things, as soon as it seems that this freedom is abused, the call is for more stringent controls, that is, for less freedom. Thus, when financial scandals, such as the Guinness affair, rocked the newly freed and deregulated "post big bang" City of London, there was an immediate call for more regulations to prevent a recurrence. When the quality of life appeared to be threatened by business, again more controls were called for.

In this latter area, the issue most often debated in Britain at present is environmental pollution-ranging from industrial effluent to the addition of chemicals to human or animal food. Nuclear power is still a major issue in Britain, with a call for a halt to further expansion and much debate over the decommissioning of old stations and the disposal of nuclear waste. It was significant that in the recent privatization of Britain's electricity industry (itself an example of another increase in freedom of choice and citizen ownership), the nations twenty-odd nuclear power stations were entirely omitted from the sale: the government believed that neither ordinary investors nor City financial institutions would buy into any package that included them.

The results of intensive farming and food production, too, have led people to question the ethics involved in this industry and to demand regulation against such varied evils as nitrates in drinking water, salmonella in chickens, and BSE in cattle. Regulation here is again supplemented by free citizen choice: organic foodstuffs are now proving major market leaders. Breeding programs, and especially transgenic programs, to develop more productive animals (either in terms of size, disease resistance, milk yield or hyper fertility), are raising similar questions from the public, and in a key debate in Parliament recently medical programs for genetic mapping involving embryo research only barely escaped being declared illegal.

Noise pollution from traffic or aircraft is also closely watched in the UK at present. Many organizations oppose the siting or enlargement of roads and aircraft runways. Indeed, the siting of any new structure, domestic or commercial, is closely monitored, to an extent that goes far beyond US zoning regulations: the public wants to see as much green space preserved as possible.

The public emphasis in Britain now, therefore, is moving towards a sustainable economy, using renewable and recycled resources, the conservation of energy, and thrift in the use of any non-renewable resource. Here again, the same dichotomy is visible: on the one hand, individual freedom of action-the growth of local groups of the Friends of the Earth, for example, or the local organization of waste-paper collection-and on the other, regulation seen in the high price of petrol (over $3 per gallon), the substantial tax discount for using unleaded fuel, and the proposed "carbon tax;' whereby any industrial emitter of greenhouse gases is subject to penal taxation on his measured emissions.

During the next decade, we expect the key questions in UK business and professional
ethics to be "are you socially responsive and democratically just?" and "are you environmentally friendly?" The trend is already underlined by City financial institutions, for example, its Stewardship environmentally responsible investment group. So far, however, no one has given overmuch attention to the possibility that answers to these two questions, which reflect the dichotomy between the two basic British desires ever since Magna Carta, to be left alone and to be told what to do, may ultimately prove to be irreconcilable.