IT IS A sociological fact: Over the last half-century, Americans have developed an almost fetishistic taste for expert opinion. Perhaps it has something to do with secularization and the need for authority, but we have of late come to bow before experts on just about everything: sex, grief, diversity, and, of course, the economy.
Between the Iraq war, which was promoted by experts who for the most part had never been to war, and the financial earthquake, the rumblings of which went undetected by the brain trust, you would think that Americans would have had enough of the think-tank oracles.
In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristoff observed that of the great multitude of economic talking heads, next to none of them recognized the pavement that we were rushing toward. Finally, there is some public scrutiny of our overreliance on expert opinion.
However, there is one cadre of experts that has not been asked to approach the bench: namely, that brigade of briefcase-toting philosophers known as "business ethicists."
Back in the '80s, just after the Michael Milken scandals, the business of business ethics took root on Wall Street and in MBA programs around the nation. Within a few years, philosophers began setting up shop in the financial districts. Every corporation worth its exec bonuses had ethics codes and workshops run by some Socrates in a suit. Many companies put ethicists on retainer and insisted that their employees sit through seminars for continuing-education credit in ethics. By the '90s, MBA programs began requiring courses in business ethics. Soon the business of business ethics was a booming multi-billion-dollar business. To what avail?
President Obama has stressed that for the most part the damage recently done to the economy was not the result of illegal activity - unethical yes, but not illegal. Hardened, white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff aside, the financial debacle was largely a matter of investors with esurient appetites for the green stuff taking unconscionable but legal risks with other people's pensions and life savings.
Did we hear a peep from the experts on ethics while these shenanigans were in play? Hardly. The silence is understandable. After all, how do you tell the company to which you are offering moral guidance that it really ought to hold back from making all it legally can? Indeed, wouldn't such restraint count as fiduciary sin, a shirking of one's duty to shareholders? And yet, if the business ethicists were not, as it is often charged, just window dressing, then the experts who do so-called "ethics audits" for a living ought to have had some way to explain that there are moral limits to the risks a manager can take, no matter how easy the money.
Aside from a lack of regulations or an inability to enforce regulations, avarice has commonly been the figure that most analysts pick out in the lineup of possible culprits responsible for the present debacle. One of the greatest ethicists of them all - Aristotle - teaches that no amount of intellectual instruction alone will thwart the development of a bottomless appetite. And yet, if business ethicists cannot do anything to diminish the tendency toward greed, they ought to close up shop.
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St.Olaf College. He is the author of the forthcoming "Ethics: The Essential Writings." 
