Ethics from Fiction

I am reading a semi-biographical novel titled Shantaram. For quick background:

It is about a man who was sentenced to 19 years in prison in his home of Australia, but he escaped a few years into the sentence and fled to India - Bombay (at the time).  He begins to live a good life in the slums - starts a free clinic for the 25, 000 slum-dwellers, befriends those in the slum and helps all when he can.  Then he eventually turns to crime again (fake passports, exchanging rupees for dollars at different percentage than the banks, etc) for various reasons dealing with his personal safety and protection.

In one scene, Lin (main character) is having a moral discussion with the man training him to do crime in India.  They begin to talk about wrong versus right...an interesting talk if you think of what these two men do for a living.  The leader - Khader - goes on to tell Lin that many people say things are wrong, but those people never seem to know why.  They may attribute it to the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads or some other text but still cannot say exactly why.  Khader then says that one must ask himself the question: "What would happen if everyone did this thing?" and "Would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?"

 His point about complexity is that if everyone ran around stealing, killing, etc then we would all be so consumed with worrying about that that we would not be able to move towards "the ultimate complexity...that is God". 

I loved this part in the novel.  And I can take what Khader calls the "ultimate complexity" and frame it around a more secular view.  It is like saying, if we were all consumed and worried because we lived in a (morally or literally) lawless state, then we would be constantly sitting at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid.  We could never reach the top to self-actualization.  It's like having students who are so concerned with feeding their families that my request for them to read The Crucible and understand the finer points of its themes is ridiculous.  That is not on their radar.  They need survival first.

So how can this be brought into business ethics?

If there were no rules - SOX or AICPA, etc - then people would be consumed with the ideas of what is really being done.  Are they being treated fairly? There would be no groundwork to keep that basic level of safety with their finances (their livelihood), so they would not be able to begin moving upwards in trust and would not use CPA's or financial advisors.  People would want to have the trust and feeling of safety, so they'd just prefer to do work on their own (possibly not very well) and do their own planning.  Because of this, I think it is quite essential that we have laws at not only the governmental level, but within that to those who deal with other aspects of our lives.  It lets the rest of us know what is being done and that we are backed up by something and needn't worry - too much.

Medical practitioners have laws (HIPAA), politicians have laws (in theory), so should those who deal with our monetary livelihood.  It is just essential if we want to move forward.