ABEL is Ethical

Doing things differently

When starting ABEL, we drew on our past experiences working in education. Over the years, we had seen good practices that we wanted to implement in our company, and bad practices that we promised we’d never expose our consultants or clients too. Like many people, we also believe in important causes such as helping the environment and promoting equal opportunities. We wanted to take this support and reflect it in our business. We wanted to set ABEL apart from others not only in our business model, but also in how we approached the ethics of running a company. 

Therefore, we established the following 3 pledges:

1. To manage ABEL in a way that supports our ethical values

One of the main ways we do this is prioritising online communication and digital materials. Anyone who has worked in a school, or an office, will know that the paper wastage can be atrocious. Even those who try to cut down, double-side printouts, and use recycled paper are still wasteful compared to a company like ours that operates predominantly online (when we offer offline services, the vast majority of resources are also cloud-based). We saw the dramatic increase in working and learning online as something which was overdue — it made sense financially, logistically, and also environmentally. 

Further details on how we aim to support the environment and other important issues can be found below in Pledge 3. 

For more details on our ethical values relating to preventing discrimination and promoting equal opportunities, click here. 

2. To work with companies and contractors with similar ethical values

One thing that can be easy to overlook is taking responsibility for who you work with. If you are operating a delivery company with a fleet of heavy goods vehicles, you might be morally against Big Oil, but you don’t really have an alternative — at the moment: your drivers still need to use their petrol stations. However, there’s no need for a school to work with, or invest in, Big Oil companies, because there are suitable alternatives. Yet there are universities investing in oil companies, schools working with militaries, and teachers delivering lessons to politicians whose values they deeply disagree with. 

At ABEL, we choose not to work with companies and contractors whose ethics we disagree with when there are clearly suitable alternatives. Similarly, we ensure that these ethical values are clear to our customers and clients. We would rather say no to a prospective consultant or client who disagreed with these values, than to compromise on them for money.

3. To contribute a proportion of our income to those who need it most

The directors of ABEL were impressed by the work of an organisation Effective Altruism, which was founded in the early 2000s by the philosophers Will MacAskill and Toby Ord. The aim of the organisation is to use evidence, research, and reason to ensure that money which is donated to help a particular cause is used in the most effective way. This often involves researching and evaluating various charities and policy initiatives related to these causes.

There are plenty of examples of how this can be done on their website, and we encourage you to look for yourself. However, the example which we found most convincing was the idea of wanting your donations to save the most lives possible. So if you imagine that you want every single donation you make to have the maximum impact of saving lives around the world, then the data from EA and the related organisation GiveWell  is very clear: you should give to organisations who fight Malaria. If you look at GiveWell’s top charities for fighting causes related to global poverty, you will see that most of them are either about Malaria or parasites. 

As they say on the Effective Altruism website, it’s likely that you spend a lot of time researching the next phone, laptop, or tablet that you are going to buy, and that’s fine — it’s very sensible. You want the best device for the money you are paying. Yet many people make charitable decisions impulsively, and sometimes our intuitions aren’t all that effective.

Another intuition that people have about charity is that there is virtue in donating anonymously and that there is even something a little bit vulgar about shouting about it. To use the popular phrase, perhaps this is a form of “virtue signalling”, i.e. aiming to show people how good you are. Maybe this is the case for some people, maybe it’s the case for all of us! However, there seems to be a very interesting argument to suggest that giving anonymously may have its disadvantages, and that the main advantage of being public about donations is that it can help normalise it and encourage others.

Therefore, in keeping with the philosophies surrounding Effective Altruism and Giving What We Can, we aim to pledge a proportion of ABEL’s future profits to the Effective Altruism movement and its associated charities. While ABEL is still in its early stages, we won’t be making the amount we contribute public, but we will be looking to do this in the near future.