Abraham Maslow’s needs theory is one of the most influential motivation theories in management and organizational behavior. What are its anthropological and ethical presuppositions? Are they consistent with sound business philosophy and ethics? This paper analyzes and assesses the anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Maslow’s needs theory from a personalistic framework, and concludes that they are flawed. Built on materialistic naturalism, the theory’s “humanistic” claims are subverted by its reductionist, individualistic approach to the human being, which ends up in a (...) needs-based ethics that understands goodness, virtue, and rights in instinctual, subjectivistic, and relativistic terms. Its moral imperative, “Be yourself!,” is either the materialistic fiat of genetic drives or the voluntaristic command of unbridled will. Significant implications for business educators, managers, and organizations are discussed, along with recommendations. Managerial theories and approaches that reduce personality to individuality are inconsistent with proper anthropological and ethical business principles. Adopting those individualistic theories may ultimately undermine organizational effectiveness, and the very essence of business as human activity and of management as human calling. Instead, personalistic anthropology and virtue ethics, rooted in Aristotelian–Thomistic thought, soundly account for properly human nature and the good life. Business educators and practitioners are encouraged to embrace this integral, truly humanistic framework for motivation, and management theory and practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the ethics of business based on the way that business activity may embody a vocation to partake in “the Good.” Following a Platonist framework for ethics and recent work on vocations by Robert M. Adams, I argue that understanding the ethics of vocations allows us to avoid the charges that business persons have to do something more for others—often couched in terms of social responsibility, sustainability, or consideration of stakeholders—in order to legitimize their careers (...) ethically. Rather, I claim, the ethics of a business vocation, as in any vocation, rests first and foremost in the way that a person pursues projects that answer an invitation to partake in the good things of this world. Thus, the promotion of the well-being of others, while ethically admirable and constitutive of some vocations, is not fundamental for understanding the ethics of vocations themselves, even in business. There are important implications for the ethics of markets, and I also consider a recent challenge to my approach that claims that true business vocations demand a more direct promotion of the well-being of others. (shrink)

This article attempts to assess the claim that the unum necessarium in our time is the general dissemination of scientific knowledge because liberal civilization or the “good society” cannot be had in the presence of traditional religion and “metaphysics.” The paper attempts to place this claim in the context of continuing globalization and related questions such as 9/11, Fundamentalist Islam, Sino-Western relations, “pop” atheism and the prospect of a “post-human” future. The paper describes the continuance of pre-Enlightenment traditions and beliefs (...) even as constant globalizing influences with their attendant secularism, atheism and technologism make their presence felt. The paper canvasses the views of Chet Raymo, C.S. Lewis, Bryan Appleyard, Werner Heisenberg, Stanley Rosen, Henry Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger and Francis Fukuyama as a means of assessing the claim that an education rooted in a simple commitment to scientific progressivism will be inadequate to the demands of the 21 st Century. (shrink)

By combining and synthesizing elements found in Austrian economics, Ayn Rand 's philosophy of Objectivism, and the closely related philosophy of human flourishing that originated with Aristotle, we have the potential to reframe the argument for a free society into a consistent reality-based whole whose integrated sum of knowledge and explanatory power is greater than that of its parts. The Austrian value-free praxeological defense of capitalism and the moral arguments of Rand, Aristotle, and the neo-Aristotelians can be brought together, resulting (...) in a powerful, emergent libertarian synthesis of great promise. (shrink)