My aim in this article is to flesh out a new distinction between moral responsibility, as it is understood in light of Strawson’s “reactive attitudes,” and an institutional form of responsibility—a responsibility that employees bear for their work to their superiors. I show that Strawson’s view of responsibility is separate from organizational responsibility, and hence the responsibility of employees to their managers cannot be understood in terms of indignation or resentment, both of which are key Strawsonian concepts. The latter type (...) of responsibility can be understood in terms of objective attitudes, managerial demands, organizational standards, and related expectations. Based on a Cartesian and a Wittgensteinian notions of asymmetry between first- and third-person uses of psychological concepts, Strawson developed a view of responsibility that dissolves the above asymmetry. In contrast with the latter asymmetry, which focuses on those who ascribe psychological concepts to themselves and to others, Strawson’s view is centered on the recipients of reactive attitudes. According to his view, resentment and indignation differ because they are aimed at different recipients, something that cannot be applied in cases of organizational responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper I describe and analyze an economic situation involving two competitive organizations. I put forth the argument that because of the systemic nature of decision making relative to managing the requirements of utilizing a descriptive equation that determines how many people an economic system can support, that even if all the players in the situation act ethically, the results will still be harmful, and necessarily so, to the system and to many innocent people. I will demonstrate that harming (...) innocent people is required and morally defensible given the choices available. The best one can do is slow down the increase in disutilities and possibly operate the system within a range of acceptable behavior that minimizes the resulting harm to innocent people, even if we cannot entirely remove this harm. In this context ethics becomes the study of the acceptable as opposed to the preferable. (shrink)

In this paper I outline an approach to managerial decision making that incorporates the important role that metaphors and moral imagination play in our moral reasoning coupled with an organisational moral concept I call the Health of the Organisation. I have used this concept in my managerial (and philosophical) career to interpret and evaluate potential, and actual, courses of action. I have concluded that this concept fits in nicely with Mark Johnson’s analysis of the metaphor of morality is health, which (...) he argues is one of the central moral metaphors in the conceptual framework that we use to interpret and evaluate actions from a reasonable moral point of view. He argues that metaphors are the essential components in defining the rational mental framework utilised in interpreting, evaluating, predicting likely outcomes from various alternatives, and choosing morally acceptable courses of action. I argue that the metaphor morality is health explicated as the Health of the Organisation can serve as an antidote to the unimaginative moral decision making processes that Patricia Werhane has shown can result in bad moral decisions. I do this by demonstrating that a healthy organisation is one that is optimally functional. This means that the components that make up the organisation are so structured that there is no better possible organisational arrangement available for achieving the goals designed to ensure successful performance in the marketplace. (shrink)