The idea of moral progress is a necessary presupposition of action for beings like us. We must believe that moral progress is possible and that it might have been realized in human experience, if we are to be confident that continued human action can have any morally constructive point. I discuss the implications of this truth for moral psychology. I also show that once we understand the complex nature and the complicated social sources of moral progress, we will appreciate why (...) we cannot construct a plausible comprehensive action-guiding theory of moral progress. Yet while the nature and sources of moral progress consistently thwart many theoretical hopes, the idea of moral progress is a plausible, critically important and morally constructive principle of historical interpretation. (shrink)

As one of the most influential commentators on the role of modern philosophy, Richard Rorty's work impacted all areas of philosophical inquiry, including business ethics. Rorty's post-foundational approach to "moral imagination" can inform how we teach business ethics in a diverse and philosophically eclectic manner. A summary of Rorty's critique of philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics will be followed by a discussion of the implications for a critical pedagogy and the pragmatic use of an expansive philosophical lexicon in a business (...) ethics course. (shrink)

The paper discusses the role that ethics theory might play in business ethics teaching. It is noted that little attention is devoted to the explanation and application of ethics theory in business ethics textbooks, which suggests that ethics theory is held in low esteem by business ethics educators. This relative disregard has been justified by some critics on the basis of the limited usefulness of ethics theory to business ethics pedagogy. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the paper argues that ethics theory can (...) play an important role in business ethics teaching which conforms to a speculative agenda. A speculative agenda is described, and a contribution that ethics theory can make to it is explained. This constitutes a form of immanent critique, which enables putative statements of business ethicality to be subjected to critique against the cultural values upon which their credibility rests. Ethics theory is offered as a mediating resource to facilitate such critique. Some criteria that the presentation of ethics theory needs to meet if it is to fulfill this speculative agenda are also outlined. (shrink)

Business ethics, as it is understood and practised generally, lacks a component of radicality. As part of the contemporary ‘return to ethics’ it displays an undesirable conservatism and blocks off possibilities for systemic alterity. I argue that a normal and ‘apologetic’ business ethics should therefore be supplemented with a radical or utopian business ethics. Put differently, business ethics should not only contribute to more responsible business practices, more morally sensitive business managers and more ethical organisational cultures, but should also facilitate (...) social hope via hermeneutic strategies aimed at changing the way we think about ourselves, our economies and the roles and responsibilities of business as such. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly”, and he proposes a graveness resolution to (...) this paradox. In response, we argue for four key claims. First, we accept Luck’s expansion of the Gamer’s Dilemma to be applicable to a wider set of media, but give a novel recasting of this in terms of the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. Second, we develop a novel criticism of Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 graveness resolution to this broader paradox. Third, we argue that the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far helps to expose an implicit moralism in the Gamer’s Dilemma literature when compared to relevant nearby literatures about other forms of media. Fourth, we consider a range of non-moral, cultural and media conventions that plausibly help to dissolve the intuitive moral gap between non-sexual and sexual violence that is central to this paradox. (shrink)

Human beings are internally inconsistent in various ways. One way to develop this thought involves using the language of value alignment: the values we hold are not always aligned with our behavior, and are not always aligned with each other. Because of this self-misalignment, there is room for potential projects of human enhancement that involve achieving a greater degree of value alignment than we presently have. Relatedly, discussions of AI ethics sometimes focus on what is known as the value alignment (...) problem, the challenge of how to build AI that acts in accordance with our human values. We argue that there is an especially close connection between solving the value alignment problem in AI ethics and using AI to pursue certain forms of human enhancement. But in addition, we also argue that there are important limits to what kinds of human enhancement can be pursued in this way, because some forms of human enhancement—namely moral revolutions—involve a kind of value misalignment rather than alignment. (shrink)

Although the map of technology ethics is expanding, the growing subdomains within it may raise misgivings. In a recent and very interesting article, Sætra and Danaher have argued that the current dynamic of sub-specialization is harmful to the ethics of technology. In this commentary, we offer three reasons to diminish their concern about ethical proliferation. We argue first that the problem of demarcation is weakened if we attend to other sub-disciplines of technology ethics not mentioned by these authors. We claim (...) secondly that the logic of sub-specializations is less problematic if one does adopt mixed models (combining internalist and externalist approaches) in applied ethics. We finally reject that clarity and distinction are necessary conditions for defining sub-fields within ethics of technology, defending the porosity and constructive nature of ethical disciplines. (shrink)

This article explains Iris Murdoch's notion of moral vision and its importance as a basic concept within applied ethics. It does so by exploring the influence of Iris Murdoch upon Alasdair Maclntyre whose ideas are frequently discussed by business ethicists. Arguably, the British philosopher Iris Murdoch who wrote -amongst others -Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, along with her contemporaries, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, pioneered the resurgence of Aristotle's virtue ethics. Furthermore, Iris Murdoch influenced Alasdair Maclntyre. Heather Widdows, in (...) her biography of Iris Murdoch lists Alasdair Maclntyre amongst those ' thinkers she inspired'. And in his writings Maclntyre does both examine Murdoch's work and acknowledge that ' Iris Murdoch has... put us all in her debt'. Murdoch was both an influential philosopher and a successful novelist. Maclntyre has stated that ' Iris Murdoch's novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubt on all philosophy, including her own'. I therefore explore in this article the influence of Iris Murdoch's literary work, where ' true vision occasions right conduct' upon Alasdair Maclntyre's portrayal of us as ' storytelling animals' on a 'narrative quest'. (shrink)

Business ethics, as it is understood and practised generally, lacks a component of radicality. As part of the contemporary ‘return to ethics’ it displays an undesirable conservatism and blocks off possibilities for systemic alterity. I argue that a normal and ‘apologetic’ business ethics should therefore be supplemented with a radical or utopian business ethics. Put differently, business ethics should not only contribute to more responsible business practices, more morally sensitive business managers and more ethical organisational cultures, but should also facilitate (...) social hope via hermeneutic strategies aimed at changing the way we think about ourselves, our economies and the roles and responsibilities of business as such. (shrink)

In business schools, there is a persistent myth according to which management education is, and should be, ‘value-free’. This article reflects on the experiences of two business schools from Finland and Australia in which the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education have been pragmatically used as a platform for breaking with this institutionalized guise of positivist value neutrality. This use of PRME makes it possible to create learning environments in which values and value tensions inherent in management education can be (...) explored and exposed. Inspired by Rorty’s understanding of ethics—notably his discussion of ‘final vocabularies’ and ‘moral imagination’—and Flyvbjerg’s reading of phronēsis, the article discusses an approach to learning that helps both teachers and students in exploring and exposing values in management education by problematizing dominant business school vocabularies, thereby leading to moral development, in the Rortian sense. The article presents a number of final vocabularies that business students come to class with, some learning methods used to challenge these vocabularies through discussion of alternative vocabularies, and the new directions for moral imagination that may result. (shrink)

We review recent developments in ethical pluralism, ethical particularism, Kantian intuitionism, rights theory, and climate change ethics, and show the relevance of these developments in ethical theory to contemporary business ethics. This paper explains why pluralists think that ethical decisions should be guided by multiple standards and why particularists emphasize the crucial role of context in determining sound moral judgments. We explain why Kantian intuitionism emphasizes the discerning power of intuitive reason and seek to integrate that with the comprehensiveness of (...) Kant’s moral framework. And we show how human rights can be grounded in human agency, and explain the connections between human rights and climate change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Whether at the executive or the line-management levels, businesspeople face moral decisions that cannot be easily resolved with reference to a shared ethos, whether because of diversity of ethea in the organization or its environment, or because the organization's ethos is inadequate for the problem at hand. These decisions are made more common by the changing norms of a pluralistic business environment, and require collective moral deliberation to be adequately resolved. Discourse ethics ideally characterizes the form of valid collective moral (...) deliberation. I argue that accommodation for the limitations of actual discourse makes discourse ethics, conceived in terms of the rules of practical discourse, practical for realizing improvements in the openness and validity of moral decision-making over states in which these rules are flagrantly violated. These rules have normative implications at the organizational level for the integrity approach to corporate ethics programs, and at the individual level for ethical leadership. (shrink)

To teach that being ethical requires knowing foundational ethical principles – or, as Socrates claimed, airtight definitions of ethical terms – is to invite cynicism among students, for students discover that no such principles can be found. Aristotle differs from Socrates in claiming that ethics is about virtues primarily, and that one can be virtuous without having the sort of knowledge that characterizes mathematics or natural science. Aristotle is able to demonstrate that ethics and self-interest may overlap, that ethics is (...) largely compatible with common sense, and that Aristotle’s virtuous person can make ethical decisions rationally. Case studies can help students improve their ethical perception and keep their values from being overwhelmed by corporate culture. (shrink)

Using the works of Richard Rorty and John Caputo, I want to suggest that we might be better off treating the traditional ethical theories of Kant, Mill, Aristotle and Hobbes as normative narratives rather than as justificatory schemes for moral decision making to be set up against one another. In a spirit akin to Husserl's ‘bracketing’ of metaphysics, when discussing ethical theories in business ethics, we can easily avoid metaphysics and use an approach that sees ethical theory as socially convincing (...) normative narratives – narratives that unify us with others insofar as they describe our phenomenological experiences in a way with which many of us mutually resonate. I will do this by attempting to show how John Caputo's thinking in Against Ethics and Rorty's postmodern pragmatism might be appropriated to some extent by us in business ethics. (shrink)

Business ethics has made important strides over the past decades, but it has also suffered significant failures as witnessed by the long line of business scandals in the past half century. This paper discusses different forms that business ethics has taken in relation to the goal of businesses acting ethically. In the end, it maintains that a major challenge current business ethics faces is the lack of an account of business organizations as they ethically develop and change both individually and (...) systemically within social and political conditions. Even if business ethicists can rationally defend what businesses should be doing, unless we can relate this to how businesses can come to operate in those ways, our normative arguments will lack power, persuasiveness, and effectiveness. Only if we are able to provide this analysis will our normative ethics fulfill the practical task it has taken upon itself. (shrink)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's death, during 2006 quite a number of cultural events were launched (cf. http://www.ibsen.net/). The article suggests celebrating Ibsen as a potentially useful resource for business ethics teaching. Departing from a short presentation of Ibsen's plays An enemy of the people and A doll's house the main focus of this paper is on two selected scenes from the latter piece -both as raw material for developing scenarios for moral maturity assessment (one (...) of them is strikingly similar to and different from Heinz' dilemma), and for teaching business students moral reflection and imagination. As an open end of the article a few wider questions are asked about the use of literature in addition to or instead of ethics when it comes to triggering moral reflection and imagination. (shrink)

This article studies the role of entrepreneurship in business ethics and promotes a resource-based ethics. The need for and usefulness of this form of ethics emerge from an analysis of contemporary business ethics that appears to be inefficacious and from a moral business practice formed out of the relationship between the veal calf industry of the VanDrie Group and the Dutch Society for the Protection of Animals in their development and implementation of a Welfare Hallmark for calves. Both organizations created (...) jointly a new meat segment in the market by trust-building and partnership. The relationship shows a remodeling of capabilities of both organizations in the light of co-creation of values. The VanDrie Group established an effectuation of moral goals by being socially sensitive and resource-minded. The DSPA created openings for dialogue by being pragmatic in its ideals. Philosophically, this article sketches a resource-based ethics with Deweyan concepts as end-in-view and transactionality of means and ends. Both organizations show in their entrepreneurship the ability to create, what is called "Room for Maneuver" by exploring, socializing, individualizing, and growing. By maneuvering they set off a form of co-evolution between business and ethics. This article demonstrates what actual moral entrepreneurship can do in bringing about moral change by combining effectively social, policy, norm, and economic related values. (shrink)

It may be nearly impossible to use standard principles to make a decision about a complex ethical case. The best decision, say virtue ethicists in the Aristotelian tradition, is often one that is made by a person of good character who knows the salient facts of the case and can frame the situation appropriately. In this respect ethical decisions and strategic decisions are similar. Rationality plays a role in good ethical decision-making, but virtue ethicists emphasize the importance of intuitions and (...) emotions as well.Virtue ethics suggests a reconciliation of the factual and the normative. Virtues may explain as well as justify actions. The same is true of other psychological states and events. That psychological terms have normative implications does not render them useless in explanation. As Aristotle does not distinguish cleanly between the normative and empirical, so many moral philosophers today reject the is-ought dichotomy. They are prepared to learn from economists, psychologists, and other empirical scientists who offer information about the nature of the good life and of values. Social psychologists who study community or corporate culture suggest a close relationship between organizational and ethical features, much as Aristotle saw a close relationship between politics and ethics. We should infer from all this that in business ethics there is good reason for philosophers and organization scholars to work closely together. (shrink)

The paper examines the contribution of the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the subject of ethics in organizations. The paper combines an analysis of Foucault’s work on discipline and control, with an examination of his later work on the ethical subject and technologies of the self. Our paper argues that the work of the later Foucault provides an important contribution to business ethics theory, practice and pedagogy. We discuss how it offers an alternative avenue to traditional normative ethical theory that (...) both converges and diverges with other extant alternatives. By situating ethics as practices of the self, and by demonstrating the conditions under which freedom in organizations can be exercised, Foucault’s ethics attempt to connect an understanding and critique of power with a personal project of self. He therefore provides a theory of subjectivity that potentially informs a reshaping of contemporary virtue ethics theory, value-based management, and business ethics teaching. (shrink)

We theorize that, in the current development of business ethics, there is a fruitful evolution that dissolves the dichotomy between the normative and behavioral research approaches developed, respectively, by philosophers and social scientists; this approach avoids many of the limitations originated by such distinction by reconnecting their two separate narratives. We call this emerging research model Humanistic Business Ethics (HBE) as it emphasizes the centrality of the human dimension of business and the importance of adopting a richer concept of humanity (...) in business ethics research. We argue that this specific research model in business ethics emerges when scholars combine a pragmatist philosophical approach with some key ideas coming from stakeholder theory, which we summarize and connect. By leveraging collaboration across ethics, economics, psychology, and entrepreneurship, HBE can help business and society scholars undertake fruitful inquiries into the way business works (and should work) at its best. (shrink)

Instrumental Stakeholder Theory has begun to suffer from what might be termed “mission drift.” Despite its initial success in creating a foothold for ethics in managerial decision-making, the efficiency arguments which now dominate this research stream have become counterproductive to the original goal of connecting ethics and capitalism. We argue in this paper that the way forward is by re-centering contingency, conversation, and inefficiency in stakeholder theory. To start this process, there needs to be a reckoning of some unintended impacts (...) of the success of the instrumental stream of stakeholder research. For a contrasting approach, we draw on Richard Rorty’s pragmatism and its foundation of ethical “irony,” a state of continuous doubts about the utility of one’s moral vocabulary. We offer a Rortian approach to stakeholder theory, unearthing the possibility for new corporate target functions in the goals of harm reduction, solidarity, and social mobility, the foundational building blocks of an ironist ethical perspective. (shrink)

In a recent letter to Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, British columnist and climate change gadfly George Monbiot pleaded with Canada to clean up its greenhouse gas emissions act. The letter appeared just a week before the Copenhagen climate conference. In it, Monbiot alleged that Canada's newly acquired status as oil superpower threatens to ?brutalize? the country, as it has other oil-rich countries (Monbiot, G. 2009. Please, Canada, clean up your act, The Globe and Mail, November 30, A15). (...) In this paper, I want to expand on Monbiot's bleak assessment of the Canadian national psyche. It has been pointed out that climate change is forcing us to rethink philosophical ethics. Some, like Dale Jamieson, believe that virtue theory is best equipped to meet the challenge of understanding the moral dimensions of this phenomenon. I think this is basically right, but that climate change is also forcing us to reassess our capacity for moral progress. The two challenges are linked. In what follows, I will first (Section 1) motivate the appeal to virtue ethics as a new way of understanding the ethics of climate change. Next (Section 2), I offer a virtue ethical account of moral progress. With the latter in place, we can (Section 3) uncover the real nature of Canada's moral failing on climate change: it is an impediment to the moral progress of our species. (shrink)

Pragmatists believe that philosophical inquiry must engage closely with practice to be useful and that practice serves as a source of social norms. As a growing alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions, pragmatism is well suited for research in business ethics, but its role remains underappreciated. This article focuses on Richard Rorty, a key figure in the pragmatist tradition. We read Rorty as a source of insight about the ethical and political nature of business practice in contemporary global (...) markets, focusing specifically on his views about moral sentiments, agency, and democratic deliberation. Importantly for business ethicists, Rorty’s approach sets in stark relief our moral responsibility as useful, practical thinkers in addressing the societal challenges of our time. We use “modern slavery” as an empirical context to highlight the relevance of Rorty’s approach to business ethics. (shrink)

Though this paper acknowledges the progress made in business ethics over the past several decades, it focuses on the challenges and limits of global business ethics. It maintains that business ethicists have provided important contributions regarding the Evaluative, Embodiment, and Enforcement aspects of business ethics. Nevertheless, they have not sufficiently considered a fourth part of a theory of moral change, an Enactment theory, whereby the principles and values business ethicists have identified might actually be followed. Enactment theory argues that appeals (...) to ethical leadership, moral imagination, and communicative participation have been insufficient to the task of closing the gap between what businesses do and what they ought to be doing. To address this problem, a theory of moral change focusing on the relations of power within which individuals and businesses operate needs to be developed. Drawing on the work of John Gaventa, the paper sketches some directions in which business ethics should proceed to help diminish this gap. The upshot is that business ethics needs greater connection with economic, social, and political theories. It also suggests that there are important limits to fostering the ethics of global business. (shrink)

This article uses sociological role theory to help understand ethical challenges faced by Norwegian real estate agents. The article begins with an introductory case, and then briefly examines the strengths and limitations of using legal definitions and rules for understanding real estate agency and real estate agent ethics. It goes on to argue that the ethical challenges of real estate agency can be described and understood as a system of conflicting roles with associated rights and duties, in particular sales agent, (...) intermediary and adviser sub-roles. The arguments are developed using exploratory findings from a survey of Norwegian real estate agents and from several focus groups. The article then suggests the use of various intranet tools as a kind of action research aimed at putting ethics on the real estate agents' agenda, working to develop a collective conscience and collective selfcriticism among the agents, and, in doing so, building bridges between academic research and the practical working world of the agents. (shrink)

At the end of their article in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Douglas R. May, Matthew T. Luth, and Catherine E. Schwoerer state that they are “hopeful in outlook” about the “evidence that business ethics instructors are….able to encourage students…to develop the courage to come forward even when pressures in organizations dictate otherwise”. We agree with May et al. that it is essential to augment students’ moral courage. However, it seems overly optimistic to believe that (...) this improvement will result from any course in business ethics. Indeed, we question the appropriateness of their measure of moral courage and assert that business ethics educators must purposely design their courses to develop students’ moral courage. In particular, we advocate introducing business ethics students to works of literature featuring protagonists who exercise moral courage in organizations. Fiction provides rich accessible narratives that show students worlds beyond their experience, awaken their imaginations, and evoke their emotions. Further, we highlight morally courageous exemplars because they inspire the cultivation of character. Joining those who underscore the role of virtue in business ethics education, we argue that exposure to moral exemplars in fiction will help students to build the moral courage they need to carry out ethical decisions in the workplace. Results from 46 students at the end of an MBA ethics course featuring moral courage provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of our approach. (shrink)

Business ethics’ theories have come under a lot of criticism lately. The problem has been the lack of a philosophical base or the inadequate implementation of it. We are trying to solve this problem by examining the roots of ethics and then applying it to the business environment. The root that has been undeservedly overlooked has been the concept of free will, the oldest philosophical problem on which every ethics theory lies. We have chosen two theories that we think would (...) be the best base for business ethics. We will shortly present the others. Since free will presents the core of business ethics, business ethicists must first agree on which theory to implement. Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ theory of free will best amplify the core of economic theory, because it gives reason a central and most important role in the theory. The concept of free will is mainly philosophical as is business ethics so the article follows this tradition, but we tried to give business examples where possible. We do not give a final conclusion because it should be reached by debate and mutual agreement between business ethicists. (shrink)

We typically test norms with reference to their usefulness in dealing with social problems and issues, though sometimes we use hypernorms to evaluate them. The hypernorms that we find most acceptable do not guide action in the way local norms do. They do, however, raise challenging questions that we should ask in evaluating any practice and its associated norms. In this respect, they differ from the principles associated with traditional, as opposed to modern, morality. As societies become more alike, in (...) part as a result of globalization, they will face increasingly similar problems. Then their local norms will be more similar, and they will be more likely to share hypernorms. Insofar as we can agree to try to justify our hypernorms, we are likely to converge on the hypernorms characteristic of modern rather than traditional morality. But people are often attached to their old norms and so are not very good at seeing how hypernorms raise questions that challenge the old norms. Here moral imagination should aid in the adjustment process. A system of democratic capitalism is hospitable to a good kind of moral convergence. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand and develop the morality of everyday activities in organizations. Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, practical wisdom, is utilized to describe the morality of the everyday work activities at two call centres of an Australian insurance company. The ethnographic data suggests that ethical judgements at the lower level of the organization are practical rather than theoretical; emergent rather than static; ambiguous rather than clear-cut; and particular rather than universal. Ethical codes are of limited value here and it (...) is argued that by developing phronesis members of the organization can improve their capacity to deal with this ethical complexity. (shrink)