Digital disruption and the climate crisis are often framed as economic or social challenges. But they force crucial moral questions. Who will be held accountable for the human cost? What will it take to transform business culture so that those costs are not treated as inevitable and acceptable?

In my view, the answers will shape not only technology’s impact on humanity and the planet but the moral foundations of democracy itself.

As a management professor who studies the calling ethic – the idea that work can be guided by principles and moral duty – I think this moment is best understood as a contest between two recurring leadership patterns.

One pattern rationalizes exploitation and disguises harm as the price of progress. Drawing on Yale law professor James Whitman’s use of the phrase “moral menace,” I use it here to name this recurring force.

In contrast, some leaders show how it’s possible to pursue principles and profits together. I call such people “moral muses”: leaders whose care and fairness promote flourishing.

The contrast is stark: Menaces dominate. Muses cultivate.

I contend the menace often wins not because it’s right, but because its practices have hardened into management orthodoxy about how to treat people. Yet its dominance can be disrupted by tracing the menace’s ancient roots and, like muses throughout history, learning how to tame it.

The menace isn’t just about greed. It’s a system of cruelty rooted in ancient Roman property law, in which wives, children, enslaved people and animals were treated as possessions and subject to abuses, including violence at the owner’s will. Whitman traces how this legal foundation evolved into........

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