Care Ethics and Unintended Consequences

Abstract

Unintended consequences regularly occur in business and professional practice and often are devastating. Although social scientists have devoted some energy to identifying such consequences, ethicists rarely speak of them. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because thought needs to be given to how we should think and act in a world fraught with unanticipated effects. Simply having good intentions does not suffice to make us responsible agents. To the extent that some unforeseen effects are nonetheless in principle foreseeable, we ought to hold ourselves accountable for trying to identify them when making choices. Moreover, if some ethical theories are better than others in coping with unintended consequences in business and professional spheres, we ought to be using these better theories more extensively, especially in applied ethics. This chapter is an attempt to remedy this neglect of an important dimension of ethical thinking. Part 1 defines just what an unintended consequence is. Part 2 gives examples of various types of unintended consequences in business and elsewhere and discusses why some are in principle foreseeable. Part 3 argues that an ethic of care is well-suited for both helping us to anticipate foreseeable unintended effects in business and for dynamically coping with them as they emerge. Part 4 provides some reasons for thinking that an ethic of care is better adapted for dealing with unidentified consequences than either utilitarian or deontological moral theories.