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Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics

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“The point of Socratic irony is not simply to destroy pretenses, but to inject a certain form of not-knowing into polis life. This is his way of teaching virtue. [...] It is constitutive of human excellence to understand—that is, to grasp practically—the limits of human understanding of such excellence. Socratic ignorance is thus an embrace of human open-endedness” Lear 2011, 36.

Abstract

Socrates’ inquiry into the nature of the virtues and human excellence led him to experience Socratic ignorance, a practical puzzlement experienced by his recognition that his central life commitments were conceptually problematic. This practical perplexity was not, however, an epistemic weakness but a reflection of his wisdom. I argue that Socratic ignorance, a concept that has not received scholarly attention in business ethics, is a central aim that business practitioners should seek. It is what a truthful, thorough, and courageous inquiry into their professional roles and commitments leads to. It wakes them up from the moral complacency engendered by organizations, forcing them to become much more critical of their day-to-day activities and more intentional about living virtuously. It curbs the corrupting potential of authority positions and prevents the tendency of subordinates to routinely conform to sanctioned norms and expectations. Finally, it opens up novel and creative moral avenues and provides a promising model to deal with the conflicts posed by our globalized and increasingly polarized world.

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Notes

  1. For an extensive review that discusses how these Socratic approaches have shaped education beyond business schools, see Mintz (2009).

  2. I will rely on Grube’s translation of Plato’s Apology (Plato 2002) and Cooper’s edition for all the other dialogues (Plato 1997).

  3. For a detailed list of the differences between the Socrates of the early and later dialogues, see Vlastos (1991a, pp. 47–49).

  4. Following the scholarly standard to refer to Plato’s works, I cite by providing the name of the dialogue followed by the number/letter in the canonical Stephanus edition. The number indicates the page number in this edition, and the letter indicates the specific section on the page where the cited passage occurs.

  5. I thank Iakovos Vasiliou and an anonymous reviewer for helping me refine my account here.

  6. For a detailed account of how Socrates made decisions in the here and now, see Vasiliou (2008, pp. 46–90).

  7. This worry could be a specific worry concerning specific industries (such as, say, tobacco or armament) or a more general worry about the social institution of capitalism.

  8. I thank Kevin Jackson for pressing me to articulate a response to this objection.

  9. A ground that, as the legal scholarship shows, is far from firm (Elhauge 2005; Hansmann and Kraakman 2001; Easterbrook and Fischel 1996; Horton 2020; Blair and Stout 1999; Stout 2012).

  10. Of course, Socratic examination should be deployed not only in contexts where we may be ethically suspicious. Socrates would also question social entrepreneurs and stakeholder-oriented executives on their commitments and aspirations, raising fundamental difficulties in the central concepts that define their roles. You can imagine Socrates pushing them to clarify what they mean by a “stakeholder,” getting them to draw unwanted conclusions from their commitment to the “social” dimension of the enterprise, and ultimately leading them to become perplexed about their fundamental professional commitments.

  11. One may object that this response fails to recognize that this dogged pursuit of truthfulness may endanger other important moral values. I discuss this worry in the section “Nihilism and Moral Corruption”.

  12. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this.

  13. Damon Horowitz. Philosophers Beyond Academia, American Philosophical Association (January 08, 2019).

  14. This strategy for constructive conflict is discussed by Latham and Locke (2006, p. 336).

  15. I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing up the relevance of Kelman and Hamilton’s work here.

  16. For a more extensive exposition of this view and its limitations, see Nussbaum (2017).

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Acknowledgements

Research on this Article was partly funded by the Columbia-Fordham Research Fellow grant. Hannah Daru and Chelsea Wegrzyniak provided valuable editorial support. Akash Jethwani, Ying Shi, and Yuchen Sun provided helpful research assistance.

I would like to express my gratitude to audiences of the Society of Business Ethics conference, the Humanities and Technology Association Conference, and the International Vincentian Business Ethics Conference. I would also like to thank, for their specific feedback and ideas on earlier version of this paper, Miguel Alzola, Helet Botha, Noah Chafets, Jay Elliott, Edwin Hartman, Kevin Jackson, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Daryl Koehn, Moses Pava, Tobey Scharding, David Silver, and Iakovos Vasiliou. All the opinions expressed here are my own, and all errors should be attributed to me.

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Mejia, S. Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics. J Bus Ethics 175, 537–553 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04650-x

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