11. Professional Ethics as a Condition for Iran’s Progress
Progress cannot be measured only by the number of factories, the volume of investment, the growth of companies, or the spread of technology. These matter, but another question must also be asked: What kind of relationships are these capacities operating within? Can contracts be relied upon? Is the quality promised actually delivered? Can specialists collaborate without fear that their work will be appropriated? Can a firm plan for the future, or must it constantly wait for the rules to change without warning?
A society may possess educated people, financial resources, and technical capacity and still be unable to bring them together in a sustainable activity. Investors fear partners, idea-holders fear collaborators, employers fear workers, and workers fear employers’ unpredictable decisions. The result is not an absolute shortage of resources but an inability to combine resources that are scattered across different hands.
Professional ethics matters precisely in this gap—not as a substitute for economic policy, law, macroeconomic stability, or infrastructure, but as a condition that allows these factors to produce results. Capital becomes cautious where commitments have little value; knowledge remains hidden where trust leads to appropriation; and law becomes expensive and ineffective in a society where everyone is concerned only with finding ways around it.
Progress Is Not Merely an Increase in Resources; It Is Also the Capacity to Cooperate
Many economic projects require resources that are not concentrated in one person or institution. One person has capital, another technical knowledge, someone else understands the market, and a group provides execution capacity. Progress is created by the ability to connect these capacities.
That connection is impossible without trust. No contract can anticipate every future event, market change, and everyday decision. For part of the journey, the parties must proceed in the hope that the other will not exploit gaps in the contract to seize a greater right.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines trust as a person’s belief that another person or institution will behave positively and reliably in accordance with that person’s expectations. The OECD also identifies interpersonal and institutional trust as factors affecting economic relationships, social cohesion, well-being, and the durability of public reforms.1 The report does not treat trust as the sole factor in development, but it shows that human cooperation becomes more fragile and costly without it.
Cross-country studies by Knack and Keefer, and later Zak and Knack, also found relationships among trust, investment, and certain indicators of economic performance.[2][3] These findings do not prove that simply increasing a trust indicator will automatically produce economic growth; differences among countries, institutional quality, and the difficulty of measuring trust prevent such a simple conclusion. Their more limited message is that expectations of others’ integrity can influence people’s willingness to cooperate, invest, and accept long-term commitments.
When trust is low, the same economic activity requires more safeguards: stronger guarantees, longer contracts, more constant monitoring, and tighter confinement of information. Such mechanisms are sometimes necessary, but they consume resources that could otherwise be devoted to production, training, and innovation.
Professional ethics does not eliminate all these costs. Even honest people need contracts and oversight. Its function is to reduce situations in which every relationship must be built from the outset on the assumption of betrayal.
Investment Requires Predictability
Investment is about the future. A person or firm incurs costs today in the expectation of seeing the results months or years later. The more unpredictable the rules, commitments, and behavior of key parties are, the shorter the investment horizon becomes.
Predictability does not depend only on the stability of a rate or an administrative circular. The professional conduct of firms and institutions also contributes to it. Is a contract honored even when it becomes costly? Does the stronger party impose new conditions after an investment has already been made? Are regulations announced before implementation? Can an economic decision be challenged and reviewed?
The Law on the Continuous Improvement of the Business Environment, adopted 16 Bahman 1390 SH, recognizes this need for participation, transparency, and stability in several provisions. Article 2 requires the government, when considering matters related to the business environment and drafting or amending regulations, to request and examine written opinions from the relevant chambers and employer and worker organizations. Articles 12–15 also provide channels for raising regulations and practices that obstruct business, dialogue between the government and private sector, and consideration of the complaints and demands of economic actors.4
Article 24 of the same law requires the government and executive agencies, in order to make economic policy transparent and create economic and investment stability and security, to inform the public in appropriate time before changes in economic policies, regulations, and procedures are implemented. Added Article 30 also provides that draft regulations relating to the business environment should be made available for information and comment before issuance and that regulations should be registered in the relevant database.[4]
The existence of these provisions does not by itself mean that stability and participation have been fully achieved. The distance between enacting a law and implementing it effectively must be assessed separately. Still, the law itself confirms an important principle: an economic actor cannot make long-term decisions in an environment where rules change without notice, dialogue, or time to adapt.
Professional ethics at the level of public institutions has meaning here as well. A responsible agency should not use earlier access to information, regulatory authority, or procedural ambiguity to benefit a particular group. A regulation may be formally valid yet create costs invisible in its administrative text if it was drafted without listening to its real effects on stakeholders.
Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Managerial Discretion
Managers need discretion to make decisions. An organization that waits months for approval of every minor action loses its ability to respond to the market. Transparency does not mean eliminating discretion or publishing all confidential information; it means making it possible to understand the basis, limits, and responsibility associated with an important decision.
In the public sector, Article 19 of the Law on the Continuous Improvement of the Business Environment emphasizes disclosure of medium and large transactions, the contracting party’s details, the subject, duration, and value of the contract so that opportunities for competition and public scrutiny exist.[4]
The logic of such a rule is not merely to discover misconduct after it occurs. When market participants know that opportunities, criteria, and outcomes of public contracts can be seen, the likelihood that personal relationships or hidden access will replace merit and competition is reduced. Achieving this objective, of course, depends on complete data, genuine access, and the ability to follow up discrepancies.
Transparency in private firms has its own proportionate form. A partner should know the accounts that affect their share and risk; a worker should know the criteria for evaluation and payment; a customer should understand the price and limitations of a product. Not every piece of organizational information should be open to everyone, but decisive information should not become visible only when the other party no longer has an opportunity to decide or object.
Secrecy is sometimes justified in the name of speed: “If we tell everyone, nothing will move.” Broad consultation may indeed be impossible in an urgent decision, but an emergency exception should not become a permanent management method. A rapid decision can still be recorded, explained, and evaluated after implementation.
Human Capital Remains Where Its Dignity and Contribution Are Recognized
Economic progress does not depend only on machines, money, and buildings. A large part of value exists in people’s tacit knowledge: experience that is not written in a book, understanding acquired from customers and processes, and skill formed through repetition and error.
This capital cannot simply be replaced by purchasing equipment. When a specialist leaves, it is not always merely a name that disappears from an employee list; part of the organization’s professional memory may leave as well. Conversely, physical presence does not necessarily mean that capability and motivation remain. Someone who is constantly humiliated, whose contribution goes unrecognized, or who lacks sufficient safety to express a dissenting view may stay in the organization while withholding their knowledge from collaboration.
Professional ethics makes two simultaneous demands for preserving human capital. The organization should take wages, dignity, learning opportunities, and fair attribution of achievements seriously; workers should maintain their skills, preserve quality, and not turn the organization’s trust into an opportunity for misuse.
An environment in which admitting error is dangerous stops learning. Employees conceal problems instead of reporting them, and managers search for someone to blame rather than repairing the process. The organization may look disciplined from the outside while the information necessary for improvement never reaches decision-makers.
A culture of accountability is not the same as a culture of punishment. Accountability asks who had what authority, what decision they made, and how harm should be remedied or recurrence prevented. A punitive culture finds the weaker person first and then constructs the story of failure around them.
Innovation Closes Its Doors in a Low-Trust Environment
Innovation requires exchange. A raw idea improves through conversation, research advances through criticism, and a new product is usually the result of collaboration among people with different specializations. If every conversation creates a risk of appropriation, such exchange becomes limited.
The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index 2025 ranked Iran 70th. In the same profile, Iran ranked 109th in “Innovation Inputs” and 46th in “Innovation Outputs.” WIPO also ranked Iran 138th in “Institutions,” 107th in “Business Sophistication,” and 98th in “Infrastructure.”5
These rankings should be interpreted cautiously. The Global Innovation Index is composed of a large set of variables; the data come from different years, and methodological changes or data availability can affect annual comparisons. These numbers alone do not prove that professional ethics causes the gap between input and output rankings.
Still, the distance between the ranking for innovation outputs and the ranking for the institutional environment presents a thought-provoking picture: a society may be capable of producing knowledge, creative works, and technical outputs while the environment that should turn this capacity into collaboration, investment, and sustainable firms is not equally strong. WIPO itself reports that Iran produces more innovation outputs than would be expected from its level of innovation inputs.[5]
This can be read both as a sign of strength and as a warning. It is a strength because scientific, technical, and creative outputs emerge despite limitations on inputs; it is a warning because innovation cannot always be sustained by squeezing more from human resources and existing capacity. Innovators need financing, reliable contracts, clear ownership, opportunities to collaborate with universities and industry, and confidence that their achievements will be protected.
Professional ethics does not build all this infrastructure, but it affects the quality of its use. Intellectual-property law without fair adjudication and clear contracts does not create sufficient confidence. An investor evaluating technology also looks at the honesty of reports, the quality of accounts, and the record of keeping commitments.
Standards Are the Measurable Form of Quality
Trust is not built by ethical advice alone. Customers, partners, and markets need some ability to measure quality. Standards provide part of that ability: they separate product characteristics, testing methods, safety, and minimum performance from purely personal judgment.
The World Bank’s World Development Report 2025 describes standards as part of development infrastructure and explains that they can strengthen quality, market coordination, technology diffusion, and firms’ access to value chains.6 At the same time, the report emphasizes that countries should select and implement standards suited to their stage of development and circumstances; inappropriate standards or weak implementation can themselves become barriers.
For an Iranian firm, a standard should be more than a seal or a file required for a license. It acquires developmental value when it changes the real production process, makes errors traceable, and gives customers something whose meaning they can trust.
If a standards certificate can be bought, an inspection is merely ceremonial, or a test result can be manipulated, the very instrument meant to create trust becomes a cover for deception. The harm then extends beyond one buyer; the credibility of the entire quality-assurance system declines.
Conversely, unreasonable rigidity and requirements disproportionate to actual risk can drive small firms out of the market and constrain innovation. The ethics of regulation asks standards bodies to balance protection of the public against the cost of implementing the rule.
Progress Requires Institutions That Are Themselves Trustworthy
Economic actors cannot be expected to honor commitments while public institutions change their own rules without explanation. Firms cannot be asked for transparency while the criteria for allocating resources or choosing contracting parties remain obscure. Professional ethics becomes a public culture only when it is visible in institutional conduct as well.
Trust in institutions is not built through advertising. People need to see that similar decisions are assessed by similar criteria, objections are heard, errors can be corrected, and personal proximity does not replace rules. World Bank research on institutional trust has likewise emphasized the relationship between trust and people’s perceptions of competence, fairness, accountability, and the quality of service delivery.7
Such trust does not mean unquestioning acceptance of official decisions. A trustworthy institution is not one that no one criticizes; it is one that does not regard criticism, information requests, and objections as threats to its existence.
Healthy trust is compatible with oversight. Citizens and firms should be able to rely on rules while retaining the ability to examine the conduct of officials. Trust without accountability can become naïveté; accountability without some degree of trust can exhaust a system through permanent control.
Ethics Must Be Able to Survive
A firm cannot reasonably be asked to maintain quality if the market rewards low-quality goods and misleading advertising more generously. An employer cannot be expected to offer fair contracts while competitors reduce costs by circumventing workers’ rights. Innovators cannot be asked to share their achievements if there is no effective way to protect confidentiality and their contribution.
Integrity is not only a personal trait; it also depends on the structure of rewards and costs. If ethical actors regularly lose while opportunists earn more, moral exhortation gradually loses credibility.
A proper structure should make correct conduct possible and misconduct costly. Clear law, accessible adjudication, credible standards, responsible professional bodies, independent media, and informed customers are all parts of this structure. None is sufficient on its own.
Ethics should not become a tool for concealing structural weakness either. When a worker claims a right, they cannot be silenced by appeals to loyalty. When a partner requests documentation, that request should not be called distrust. Genuine ethics is not afraid of the right to ask questions or to document.
Progress Is Not the Same as Speed
Sometimes a firm, market, or economic sector grows rapidly while ambiguous contracts, unstable quality, exhausted workers, or noncompetitive privileges lie beneath that growth. Such growth may appear in the numbers while lacking the capacity to continue.
Sustainable progress does not make slowness a virtue. Speed is valuable where it comes from better technology, accurate decisions, and elimination of waste. The difference lies in what rapid growth has consumed: did it reduce waste, or did it consume trust and other people’s rights?
A firm that sells beyond its capacity through aggressive advertising may look successful for a while, but it later repays its debt of trust through customer complaints, employee burnout, and loss of credibility. An organization that removes training and maintenance to meet a short-term target has, in effect, borrowed from its own future.
Real progress increases not only today’s output but also tomorrow’s capacity. It leaves behind more skill, builds more reliable relationships, and increases the possibility of future collaboration.
How Does Professional Ethics Become an Economic Advantage?
Professional ethics moves beyond slogans when it becomes visible in decisions. A firm states a product’s price and limitations clearly; records and remedies errors; defines ownership of ideas and data in contracts; makes worker payment and evaluation predictable; and discloses conflicts of interest before decisions are made.
These behaviors may carry short-term costs. Low-quality products are cheaper to make, exaggerated promises sell more easily, and ambiguous contracts give the stronger party more discretion. The ethical advantage appears over a longer horizon: fewer complaints, returning customers, retention of skilled workers, more feasible partnerships, and lower monitoring costs.
Not every economic success should be treated as a reward for ethics, nor every failure as evidence of unethical conduct. An ethical firm may fail because of recession, a bad technical decision, or lack of resources. Ethics does not guarantee profit; it is a way of ensuring that profit does not depend on destroying rights and trust.
For ethics to become an advantage, the market must also be able to recognize it. Quality reports, a record of accountability, contractual transparency, credible certification, and opportunities for comparison help customers distinguish ethical claims from actual behavior.
Iran Needs to Connect Human Capacity with the Institutional Environment
The preceding sections have shown that Iranian society possesses an ethical tradition of futuwwa, educated human resources, technical capacity, and creative potential. The challenge is not only to produce talented individuals; it is to build an environment in which dispersed talent can come together without fear and under clear rules.
With all their limitations, Global Innovation Index data show the same duality in another form: Iran’s ranking in knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs is better than its ranking in institutional components and business sophistication.[5] This gap is not a definitive judgment on Iran’s economy, but it raises a serious question: how much existing capacity is lost before it can become a sustainable firm, a competitive product, or a long-term collaboration?
The answer cannot be reduced to individual conduct alone. Regulatory stability, access to finance, infrastructure, the judicial system, macroeconomic conditions, and international connections also affect outcomes. Professional ethics is one part of this system, not a complete explanation of it.
Yet this part should not be dismissed as small. Good policy is poorly implemented in an organization that distorts information; good law is circumvented in a market where violations are treated as cleverness; and capital is lost in a partnership with unclear accounts and authority.
Reform must therefore move in both directions: institutions should make integrity possible and defensible, while professionals should not wait for the law to issue a separate instruction for every hidden moment in their conduct.
Progress Means Making Relationships More Trustworthy
Iran’s progress does not occur only when production, exports, or patent registrations increase. Part of it is visible in the quality of everyday relationships: customers buy with greater confidence, workers know that their rights can be claimed, employers can rely on workers’ commitments, partners are not afraid of transparency, and idea-holders do not need to build permanent walls simply to have a conversation.
This form of progress may not look like the inauguration of a large project, but it is infrastructure for every sustainable project. A society in which promises have value can build larger contracts and more complex forms of cooperation. A society in which every form of access creates a risk of appropriation remains small and cautious even when it possesses abundant resources.
Professional ethics is not a sufficient condition for Iran’s progress, but without it many other conditions cannot reach their full potential. Capital needs trust, technology needs cooperation, markets need quality, and law needs people who do not see its purpose merely as an obstacle to be circumvented.
The next section of the article turns to a practical question: How can professional ethics be transformed from individual advice into real infrastructure? The answer lies in connecting education, law, contracts, professional and trade institutions, the media, and firms’ internal mechanisms.