He’s an Oxford-trained philosopher of war. CEOs can’t get enough of him
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In spring 1994, the governor-general of New Zealand was welcomed to Oxford university with a traditional Māori ceremony known as a pōwhiri. On the croquet lawn of St John’s College, a semi-naked warrior laid down a ritual challenge before placing a fern on the ground for her to pick up in order to show she came in peace.
The challenger was not a Māori, but a red-haired, pale-skinned 23-year-old philosophy student called David Rodin. This ritual had a special significance for Rodin, who had grown up practising Māori martial arts in New Zealand with his brother, the only white boys in a friendship group of Māori teenagers. When he performed the ceremony at Oxford, Rodin was at the start of a philosophical journey into the ethics of warfare that would bring him, eventually, into the boardrooms of Wall Street and the City of London. There, he attempts to teach business executives how moral philosophy can help them at work.
“There’s a part of me that [thinks] if it wasn’t for the killing, I would have loved to have been a soldier,” Rodin told me earlier this year, when I asked him about the Oxford pōwhiri 30 years ago. There’s a reminder of the passionate young student in his Kiwi-accented response. “With something like [that ceremony] you get all of that. You get the discipline and you get the beauty of the craft, you get the tradition . . . But it’s been defanged.”
A day earlier, in a glass-walled office near St Paul’s Cathedral, I had watched as Rodin again laid down a challenge. This time his tribal dress was jeans, an open-necked shirt and a blazer, and his weapon was PowerPoint.
Rodin was addressing Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the Confederation of British Industry, the UK business association known as the CBI, and the rest of her executive committee. “If you were making a financial decision, it would be mad to do it without a basic familiarity with economics,” the philosopher told the group. “But when it comes to ethics, a lot of people do exactly that . . . What I’m here to tell you is that there’s a huge component of ethical decision-making that’s like capital allocation, economics or fiscal decision-making. There are important ethical tools. If you don’t understand them, the odds are you aren’t going to end up in a good place.”
Newton-Smith and her colleagues were indeed emerging from a very bad place. The CBI once had a blue-chip corporate membership and a direct line to ministers and government officials to discuss policy. But, in spring 2023, media reports of sexual misconduct, including allegations of the rape of two women working there, triggered a crisis. The scandal shattered trust in the organisation and threatened its survival. Prominent corporate members such as Aviva, Tesco and NatWest quit or distanced themselves, and the government temporarily broke off relations with the group.
Newton-Smith took over just after the scandal broke, seeking to repair the damage to the institution. She turned to Rodin and his advisory firm. Rodin’s review of CBI culture found a strong purpose and some “pockets of good practice”, but it also revealed weaknesses.
What got the CBI into trouble, according to his diagnosis, was neglect of the ethical basics. Now Rodin’s goal was to take the team all the way to the other end of the spectrum of moral philosophy. He sought to make them “think like philosophers” about leadership and judgment, drawing on insights he had acquired applying ethical principles to the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.
According to Rodin, business ethics has focused too much on risk management, controls and enforcement, while neglecting how people interact and behave. Ethical culture is not only “about enforcing rules and structures”, he told me. “It’s the social component: do I have a group of people around me who I trust enough and they trust me that we will hold each other to account?”
At the CBI, Rodin displayed a slide with a triangular diagram showing the interlocking insights of a trio of philosophers: Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians, who promote actions that achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics, emphasising duty; and Aristotle’s virtue ethics or “doing the right thing”. He described the thinking of the three schools as, respectively, the Good, the Right and the Fitting. “I know this sounds rather theoretical,” he told the CBI team. “But it’s most relevant when it’s anchored in a question that’s live to you.”
The executives were serious, attentive and apparently receptive to Rodin’s ideas. He invited them to interject, and they confronted him with live dilemmas about CBI member relations, staff engagement and the tension between confidentiality and transparency. Shortly after that March meeting, the CBI admitted it had used non-disclosure agreements to prevent staff from speaking publicly about their workplace experiences, an illustration of exactly the sort of complex situation Rodin was training them to handle.
As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the early 1990s, Rodin became interested in the field of “just war theory”, which explores how wars ought to be waged.
Traditional principles of ethical warfare, found in the work of Augustine and Aquinas, are based on the Latin terms jus ad bellum, the right to wage war, and jus in bello, proper conduct in war. Just war theory’s foremost contemporary proponent is the American philosopher Michael Walzer, who argued that soldiers had an equal moral right to fight and kill, whether they wore the uniform of Nazi Germany or, say, Poland, provided they observed the rules of war, such as not attacking non-combatants.
The field of “just war theory” was “ripe for reinvention”, Rodin told me. He became one of the proponents of what is now known as “revisionist just war theory”. Instead of focusing on the rights and responsibilities of warring states, Rodin’s work put the moral responsibility of individual combatants front and centre of the ethical debate. Once you do that, he told me, “it turns out, everything kind of changes”.
Rodin was partly inspired by his parents’ unconventional love story. His father, Sam, was a third-generation Jewish immigrant. Hitchhiking in Cornwall after the end of the second world war, he met and fell for a beautiful blonde German visitor, Rose. Her background was obscured by a story she’d confected. In fact, she had been raised Catholic and her father had fought for the Nazis before being taken prisoner by the Soviets. To escape Sam’s parents’ disapproval, the couple emigrated to New Zealand.
But the marriage broke down and Rodin felt thrust into the role of primary provider for his mother and brother.
Instead of pursuing a conventional academic path to tenured professorship after Oxford, Rodin independently raised funds for research projects. After 9/11, he talked to “the captains, the majors, the lieutenant colonels who are the real fighting, thinking heart of the army” as they returned from tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. They told Rodin “the old architecture isn’t working.”
In 2002, Rodin turned his research into a book, titled War and Self-Defense. Richard Schoonhoven, who has taught philosophy at the US military academy at West Point for more than 20 years, describes it as “one of the founding documents in the field”. Bob Underwood, a colonel and chief of staff of the US Army Training Directorate, came across Rodin’s book in 2007 while studying for a masters thesis in philosophy.
Underwood had taken part in difficult counter-insurgency operations in Baghdad against a Sunni militant group, and Rodin’s book “connected with my experience of battle in the way that the [just war] literature I was familiar with never had”, he said. Applying Rodin’s theory would have given soldiers on the ground the freedom to “engage in moral reasoning” and base “the choices we make to kill some and save others accord with the demands of justice, as opposed to the demands of the operation”.
Meanwhile Rodin was moving further and further from academia. He had learnt an important lesson from his work with the military: high-minded principles and bayonet-sharp thinking take you nowhere if you have not forged a coalition to put them into effect. When “you get inside an organisation like the US Army . . . you realise, holy crap, it’s not just about getting the argument right. It’s about understanding how the machinery of this organisation works,” he said. His next move was to apply that insight to the corporate world.
Business ethics have roots almost as deep as military ethics. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published after his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which sought to explain how people make moral decisions. Later on, thinkers on management and economics recognised the ethical basis and boundaries of business. Management writer Peter Drucker saw ethics and integrity as the foundation of healthy enterprise. Milton Friedman, the great proponent of the supremacy of “shareholder value”, wrote that “ethical custom” was one of the “basic rules of society” that constrained business owner’s desire to “make as much money as possible”.
As a business journalist, I know the overriding majority of businesses are run legally and ethically, but I have also seen how business leaders can be tempted over the line into unethical behaviour. In 1988, I flew to interview the media baron Robert Maxwell on the yacht from which he fell to his death three years afterwards. It was later discovered he had stolen more than £400mn from his employees’ pension fund. In Milan in the 1990s, I wrote about the fallout from the Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”) political and business corruption scandals. And as the FT’s New York bureau chief, I covered the shockwaves from the collapse of Enron in 2001. The transgression that triggered the energy trader’s eventual demise took place in 1999, when the group’s blue-chip board agreed to waive its code of ethics, allowing its finance director to run independent off-balance-sheet entities in what looked like a blatant conflict of interest and turned out to be fraud.
I thought Enron would be a landmark, after which serious corporate malfeasance would surely decline. The following year, President George W Bush put his weight behind the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which introduced heavy criminal penalties and mandated that senior executives should certify their accounts personally. Business schools scrambled to institute, or beef up, ethics classes for MBA students. The compliance industry, ideas about stakeholder capitalism and corporate purpose and values took off.
But unethical behaviour continued, whether in the mis-selling of subprime mortgages that triggered the 2008 financial crisis; or the cross-selling at US bank Wells Fargo in 2016, when staff were found to have created fake accounts for customers to meet aggressive internal sales goals. Earlier this year, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing money from customers to make risky bets. “He knew it was wrong. He knew it was criminal,” the judge said.
Often it feels as though advocates for ethical business are trying to push water uphill. In 2012, British lawyer Anthony Salz was appointed by Barclays to investigate the bank’s culture in the wake of its involvement in the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark. His review drew an important distinction between legal compliance and ethical behaviour. “Barclays was sometimes perceived as being within the letter of the law but not within its spirit,” he wrote, urging the bank to embed the values necessary to build a strong ethical culture.
“I used to think [business ethics] went in cycles: people behaving very badly for a bit and then something goes badly wrong, people clear it up and then it goes back to normal ethical behaviour,” Salz told me. “I think the answer is you need leadership that believes in it, without which you have no hope.”
Academics continue to try to direct students towards the core principles of moral leadership and here, occasionally, the echoes of the ethics of war can be heard. Sandra Sucher drew directly on military ethics for her elective course on ethics at Harvard Business School, titled “The Moral Leader”, notably Michael Walzer’s dictum that “War is the hardest place: if comprehensive and consistent moral judgments are possible there, they are possible everywhere.”
In the early 2010s, Rodin became increasingly interested in the connection between the application of ethics on the battlefield and ethics in business. Between stints at Oxford, he had spent two years with Boston Consulting Group. Despite his self-assessment that he was “a lousy junior consultant”, he had seen a need for “proper rigorous ethics advisory” service that would charge BCG- and McKinsey-level fees.
The spark was struck in Davos, where corporate high-mindedness and virtue-signalling, raw dealmaking and basic networking collide. At the World Economic Forum’s 2014 summit in the Swiss Alps, Rodin met Citigroup chief executive Mike Corbat, who was two years into an attempt to rehabilitate the bank following a series of fines from regulators.
Within months of the Davos meeting, Corbat asked the philosopher to work with the board to examine the ethical foundation of its business practices.
Rodin had an instinct for a method that might work but no business model for Principia, the consultancy he had founded that year. (Principia is Latin for first principles.) He called on contacts in the military and academia to help. One executive compared the team Rodin gathered for these early assignments to the Marvel superheroes “the Guardians of the Galaxy”.
They included Anthony Salz; Ian Fishback, an Iraq veteran whose whistleblowing letter to Senator John McCain about US abuse of Iraqi prisoners triggered landmark anti-torture legislation; philosophers Bradley Strawser from the US Naval Postgraduate School and Marco Meyer from the University of Hamburg; and business ethics specialist Nien-hê Hsieh from Harvard Business School.
With Citi as their guinea pig, they developed the tools that Principia now uses to assess the ethical culture of new clients. Rodin analyses responsibility (do individuals understand what they should be providing?), capability (do they have the capacity to make the right decisions?) and motivation (are they encouraged to make the right decisions?). The outcome at Citi included the framing of a “social value proposition”, still in place, about the purpose of a global bank.
These days, Principia has about 10 full-time staff, including non-philosophers such as data analysts and behavioural scientists; 10 contributors, from academia and beyond, who offer a couple of days a week of their time; and a broader network of 30 or so academics and people with business experience. “It’s quite an odd bunch: [the challenge is] how do you keep the oddness and uniqueness but still be organised,” said Sarah Miller, a non-philosopher, who joined Principia from the international aid world in 2020. She is now chief executive, tasked with managing the firm’s thinkers.
Together, they have driven moral philosophy deep into the culture of a number of big companies and organisations worldwide. Janti Soeripto, chief executive of Save the Children US, says Rodin and Principia have given the charity “the language and the practical tools to make things discussable”. At pan-African bank Ecobank, Rodin’s address to leaders of its subsidiaries across the continent was so convincing that a number of its regional offices include the two-day meeting as a landmark in their official corporate histories. Principia’s work with Salesforce, the US software group, helped it frame a policy not to work with retail clients that sold military-style firearms.
“[David] can listen to a problem in a very, very deep way and almost play it back to you,” says Adrian Gore, chief executive of the South African healthcare group Discovery, where the boardroom was particularly receptive to the triangle of the Good, the Right and the Fitting and the philosophical principles behind it. In 2021, Principia worked with Gore and his team on the delicate issue of how Discovery should bring in a vaccine mandate for South African workers during the pandemic, in a country with a record of vaccine hesitancy.
The question was how to balance the utilitarian need to implement a mandate with what Rodin describes as “the deeply personal right to control your body”. Some staff had legitimate religious and health objections. Principia and Discovery categorised these exceptions and worked out how to recognise and remedy what philosophers call “the moral remainder” — those rights that would be infringed by any compromise. Discovery eventually vaccinated 98 per cent of its staff, reaching a “reasonable accommodation” with those who held out. “I’m very proud of the outcomes,” says Gore.
Before Principia’s involvement, Gore reckoned his board “had a handle” on the complex ethical issues it sometimes had to grapple with. “That was a cognitive error,” he told me, uncovered by Rodin in his interaction with directors. “The board suddenly realise they are in a higher thinking process. They have an epiphany. Suddenly, ‘Shit, this is deeper than I thought. This guy is more intelligent [than me].’ David lifts it up to a godly level. You’re talking to god, we need to listen with respect.”
Other clients start with more down to earth expectations. The CBI’s Rain Newton-Smith admitted that one concern about hiring Principia last year was that they might end up like the players in the Monty Python football sketch in which Germany takes on Greece at “International Philosophy” and the thinkers “just wander about and it’s a terrible game”. The principles she wanted laid out “had to be something we could practically do and not just theoretical thought experiments”.
Principia ran a culture review, interviewing nearly half the staff at the CBI, before producing a report that found the organisation had “under-attended to developing a strong, values-based organisational culture and [had] under-prioritised people management skills”. A year on, Newton-Smith credits Rodin’s team with helping build a list of values including integrity, respect, brilliance and courage.
Until a few years ago, Rodin would insist clients sign a commitment not to talk about their work with Principia, which also took a vow of confidentiality. The message, he said, was that “the only value” to a client of deploying his crack team of thinkers was “the difference we make in your organisation. You’re not going to get a PR win from this”.
That has changed. Rodin says he realised it could be valuable for other organisations to see what Principia clients had learnt from successful assignments — and that invisibility could be a commercial disadvantage. (As a private company, Principia does not publish its accounts but Rodin says it has annual revenue of about $5mn.) When the CBI published a press release explaining the steps it had taken, it cited the consultancy’s critical conclusions, but also its judgment that the consultancy did “not find that blanket descriptions such as ‘toxic’ or ‘misogynistic’ [were] accurate or useful descriptions”.
Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried remains unconvinced. He believes business leaders act primarily in their own self-interest. Sometimes they move from unethical behaviour to outright fraud, punishable by law. “If the threat of jail isn’t enough to incentivise you, bringing in a consultant isn’t going to make much difference,” he said. “PR advisers make a difference . . . Risk management consultants — they make a difference.” Ethics consultancies, by implication, do not.
“Are businesses more ethical now? Probably,” said Fried. “But it isn’t because they’re trying to be more ethical, but because they’re operating under certain constraints in the labour market and the immediate environment that have made it more costly to engage in ‘morally bad’ behaviour.”
Addressing the CBI executive team, Rodin had said: “A lot of people ask me: are you guaranteed to do well by doing the right thing? The answer is complicated but in the long run you’re much more likely to have a healthy, robust, sustainable business by thinking seriously about it.”
Whether you are a military officer or a business leader, however, thinking seriously about the ethical framework behind your behaviour can only take you so far. “Consultants don’t sit at your desk to enact change,” Newton-Smith pointed out. “That comes down to what you do as an executive.”
My post-Enron optimism about a permanent sea-change in business ethics was misplaced. Each new generation of executives feels the tug of temptation to behave unethically. Some are bound to succumb. But that is no reason not to try to teach them how not to.
Andrew Hill is the FT’s senior business writer and a member of the advisory council of the Institute of Business Ethics
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