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Virtue Beyond Contract: A MacIntyrean Approach to Employee Rights

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Abstract

Rights claims are ubiquitous in modernity. Often expressed when relatively weaker agents assert claims against more powerful actors, especially against states and corporations, the prominence of rights claims in organizational contexts creates a challenge for virtue-based approaches to business ethics, especially perspectives employing MacIntyre’s practices–institutions schema since MacIntyre has long been a vocal critic of the notion of human rights. In this article, I argue that employee rights can be understood at a basic level as rights conferred by the rules constitutive of practices. As such, employee rights correspond to the obligations of practitioners to treat fellow practitioners according to the standards of excellence and requirements of justice. Thus, one way that managers can ensure that their core practice is well-functioning is to recognize employee rights. One implication of this argument is that managers should adopt a more positive stance toward labor unions, insofar as they are a key way for employees to ensure that their voice is heard, and their rights respected.

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Notes

  1. Research suggests that many criminal organizations, such as the mafia, where any notion of a good purpose seems to be lacking, are actually ethically ambivalent, often fulfilling important social functions, contributing in a distorted manner to the common good, while also unjustly exploiting others (Hagedorn 2008; Kilcullen 2010, 2015). This is not to say that criminal organizations are practices but it does suggest that most organizations, especially lawful corporations, present a rather mixed picture, contributing to the common good, while also engaging in forms of injustice. Though clearly some organizations, such as concentration camps lack any sort of direction to the common good. As Moore (2017, p. 146) says, “The conclusion we have reached, therefore, is a rather nuanced one. Not everything is a practice; some activities are excluded because they do not have internal goods which serve the common good (concentration camps, for example). Some activities clearly are practices even if, sometimes, they stand in need of moral criticism (chess, medicine, architecture, for example). And some activities may have been practices in the past, or could have the potential to be practices in the future, but institutional corruption and acquisitiveness is such that there is barely any evidence of practice-like features (banking, for example). But in the latter case, it may yet be possible to redeem these activities so that they, at least, begin to exhibit practice-like features.”

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  1. IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Caleb Bernacchio

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Bernacchio, C. Virtue Beyond Contract: A MacIntyrean Approach to Employee Rights. J Bus Ethics 171, 227–240 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04435-2

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