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The Limits of Generosity: Lessons on Ethics, Economy, and Reciprocity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

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Abstract

This paper interrogates the relation between reciprocity and ethics as it concerns participation in the world of work and organizations. Tracing discussions of business and organizational ethics that concern themselves, respectively, with the ethics of self-interest, the ethics of reciprocity, and the ethics of generosity, we explore the possibility of ethical relations with those who are seen as radically different, and who are divested of anything worth exchanging. To address this we provide a reading of Franz Kafka’s famous novella The Metamorphosis and relate to it as a means to extend our understanding of business and organizational ethics. This story, we demonstrate, yields insight into the unbearable demands of ethics as they relate to reciprocity and generosity. On this basis, we draw conclusions concerning the mutually constitutive ethical limitations of reciprocity and generosity as ethical touchstones for organizational life while simultaneously accepting the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of exceeding those limits. In such a condition, we argue, ethics is not best served by adopting idealistic or moralizing positions regarding generosity but rather by working in the indissoluble tensions between self and other.

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Notes

  1. There are numerous published versions of the story, the citations in the text are to the ebook version made available by the Project Gutenberg with a copyrighted translation by David Wyllie.

  2. While it is true that Levinas was ‘relatively uninterested’ in animals, he was not entirely uninterested. In a short chapter of his book Difficult Freedom (Levinas 1990) Levinas recalls his time as a Jewish prisoner of war incarcerate by the Nazis in Germany. These we conditions that he says robbed the prisoners of their humanity; as Jews they were treated as ‘subhuman’ and akin to apes. Levinas recalls how he and his fellow prisoners were befriended by a stray dog that they named Bobby. In the dog’s lively and excited response to the prisoners Levinas states that: “He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men” (p. 153). Despite the possibility of this encounter reflecting the alterity of the dog and its capacity for ethics, Levinas does not develop this and for the most part his work assumes that “animal life is inherently and brutally self-serving” with ethics retained by him entirely for humanity (Plant 2011, p. 57).

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Rhodes, C., Westwood, R. The Limits of Generosity: Lessons on Ethics, Economy, and Reciprocity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis . J Bus Ethics 133, 235–248 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2350-1

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