Abstract
Research in business ethics has largely ignored questions of equality and dissensus, raised by theorists of radical democracy. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work has been very influential in business ethics, has developed a novel approach to virtue ethics rooted in both Aristotelian practical philosophy and a Marxian appreciation of radical democracy. In this paper, we bring MacIntyre into conversation with Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe and argue the following: first, MacIntyre’s work has significant similarities with Rancière and Mouffe, thus suggesting that MacIntyrean business ethics has the potential to address the concerns of radical democrats; second, the MacIntyrean business ethics literature has not adequately incorporated the aspects of Macntyre’s work addressing concerns regarding equality and dissensus and future work should pay more attention to these concerns.
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Notes
Moore ( 2017, pp. 191–192) explains the MacIntyrean framework as follows: “The key to developing from the individual and communal virtue ethics approach, to explore what we might call the intermediate level of organizations was, of course, MacIntyre’s claim that practices have to be institutionalized if they are to survive for any length of time. And it was this idea of organizations as practice-institution combinations which gave us the particular way of thinking about—this particular metaphor for—organizations which we have explored at length. We saw how practices focus on the achievement of internal goods, and institutions on external goods, and, while they form a ‘single causal order,’ this also exposed a fundamental tension inherent in all organizations—the tension between the pursuit of internal versus external goods, in which ‘the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution.’”
See for example Rod Dreher’s (2017) The Benedict Option. MacIntyre (2007, p. xv) resolutely rejects conservatism: “[C]onservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism… Such conservatism is as alien to the projects of After Virtue as liberalism is. And the figure cut by present-day conservative moralists, with their inflated and self-righteous unironic rhetoric, should be set alongside those figures whom I identified in chapter 3 of After Virtue as notable characters in the cultural dramas of modernity: that of the therapist, who has in the last 20 years become bemused by biochemical discoveries; that of the corporate manager, who is now mouthing formulas that she or he learned in a course in business ethics, while still trying to justify her or his pretensions to expertise; and that of the aesthete, who is presently emerging from a devotion to conceptual art. So the conservative moralist has become one more stock character in the scripted conversations of the ruling elites of advanced modernity. But those elites never have the last word.”
MacIntyre (2016, p. 131) says, “We thus find in two very different cultural settings, Japanese and British, with work that makes use of two very different technologies, those of automobile manufacture and of television, the same contrast between two kinds of activity, one a mode of practice in which workers are able to pursue ends that they themselves have identified as worthwhile, in the pursuit of which they hold themselves to standards of excellence that they have made their own, the other an organization of activity such that their work is directed toward ends that are the ends of administrators and managers imposed upon their activities. In the former the primary responsibility for the quality of the end products of the work lies with the workers, who in this respect are treated as agents with rational and aesthetic powers, even though their labor is still exploited.”
Leist (2011) criticizes MacIntyre’s teleological conception of morality arguing that Mouffe’s agonistic theory avoids this problem. In responding to Leist, MacIntyre (2011) argues that any adequate account of human nature is necessarily be teleological, and careful analysis of “the virtues as specific to this or that time and place, provides us with grounds for making universal claims both about human nature and about the functioning of the virtues” (p. 309).
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Couch, R., Bernacchio, C. The Virtues of Equality and Dissensus: MacIntyre in a Dialogue with Rancière and Mouffe. J Bus Ethics 164, 633–642 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04400-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04400-8