There’s a pattern I keep seeing in how organizations justify doing the right thing. And I think it explains why those commitments so often collapse the moment pressure arrives.
The pattern looks like this: Someone proposes that the organization should treat people better, act more responsibly, or consider impacts beyond the next quarter. The proposal gets resistance. So advocates reach for the argument most likely to work in a boardroom. They make the business case.
Diverse teams perform better. Sustainable practices attract conscious consumers. Fair wages reduce turnover. Humane working conditions improve productivity. Safety investments lower liability costs. Ethical supply chains protect brand reputation.
These arguments work. They get programs funded, policies approved, initiatives launched. They translate values into vocabulary that executives understand. It feels pragmatic. It feels smart.
It’s also a trap.
Here’s the problem: when you sell the right thing using a business case, you’ve implicitly agreed that the business case is what matters. You’ve accepted profit as the legitimate arbiter of whether people deserve dignity, whether the environment deserves protection, whether communities deserve consideration. And the moment that arbiter changes its mind, you’ve lost your argument entirely.
When budgets tighten, programs built on ROI justifications get cut first. When leadership changes, commitments get “reevaluated.” When someone decides the return isn’t provable, the whole justification evaporates. Advocates spent years insisting this was about performance, not principle. Now they’re trapped by their own framing.
Compare that to worker safety. It became widespread not because someone proved the ROI, but because we decided as a society that people shouldn’t die at work. The business case came later, and it helped, but it wasn’t the foundation. The foundation was a moral commitment that didn’t require justification every budget cycle.
I’ve been in rooms where leaders debated whether to treat people well, and the conversation always circled back to metrics. Will this reduce attrition? Will it improve engagement scores? The implication was clear: if the numbers don’t support it, we won’t do it.
But what kind of organization decides whether to treat people with dignity based on whether it’s cost-effective?
Most of them, it turns out. Because we taught them to think this way. We validated it every time we made the business case instead of the human one.
I’m not saying the business case is wrong. The evidence behind many of these arguments is real. But evidence-based arguments can always be countered with different evidence, different methodology, or changed circumstances. Moral arguments are harder to dismiss. You can’t run a regression analysis on whether people deserve respect. When the foundation is ethical rather than empirical, the burden of proof shifts. You’re no longer asking “Does this pay off?” You’re asking “What kind of organization do we want to be?”
That’s a question that survives budget cuts.
This matters now because we’re about to face a wave of decisions where the same pattern will play out. How we treat workers as AI reshapes the economy. How we handle communities disrupted by automation. How we balance efficiency against human dignity when machines can do it faster and cheaper.
If we justify humane treatment of displaced workers by arguing it “maintains social stability” or “protects consumer spending,” we’re building on straw again. The moment someone decides the instability is manageable, the justification disappears.
If we argue for human dignity because people have value beyond their economic productivity, because we’re building a society and not just an economy, that’s harder to undo. It’s not contingent on a spreadsheet.
I’ve seen leaders who refused to treat fairness as optional, who built cultures where dignity wasn’t up for debate. Those cultures don’t collapse when the economy turns. They endure because they’re built on something that doesn’t need justification every budget cycle.
The business case can still be part of the conversation. But it should be the second argument, not the first. The first should be about who we are and who we want to be. About whether certain things are right regardless of whether they show up in the earnings report.
That’s a harder sell in a lot of boardrooms. But it’s also the only sell that lasts.
We’ve spent decades building important commitments on houses of straw, then wondering why they blow down so easily. The wolf always shows up eventually. He doesn’t need to be any particular wolf. He just needs to blow.
Next time, maybe we try brick.
Better Places 