Abstract
As with other fields of applied ethics, philosophers engaged in business ethics struggle to carry out substantive philosophical reflection in a way that mirrors the practical reasoning that goes on within business management itself. One manifestation of the philosopher’s struggle is the field’s division into approaches that emphasize moral philosophy and those grounded in the methods of social science. I claim here that the task for those who come to business ethics with philosophical training is to avoid unintentionally widening the gap between philosophical theory and business management by emphasizing the centrality of practical wisdom (phronesis) to both good managment and to the moral life. Distinguishing my own approach from recent emphases on phronesis in management literature, I draw on the concepts of social practice and of narrative to tie practical reasoning to a company’s unique story. Practical reason, social practices and narrative are employed together to give an account of the art of management at Patagonia. The essay hopes to both provide a way for philosophers engaged with business ethics to see family resemblances between their practices and those of business management and to offer a pedagogical example useful for those in any discipline interested in viewing businesses ethically.
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Notes
In an initial effort to unify the field, Linda Trevino and Gary Weaver lay out the different assumptions employed in these approaches and describe the different kinds of academic formation typical of proponents of each of the approaches (Trevino and Weaver 1994)
Donovan and Green’s framing of the problem of business ethics and moral philosophy parallels Michael Pirson’s observation about management and morality. Pirson finds that the abstract, “economistic” modeling of organizations of recent times has led to poor moral vision with regard to human beings at the center of corporations. In “In a time of Global Upheaval-Humanistic Management Needed More than Ever” he writes that the “technocratic approach to human systems design” has made “the notion of dignity as that which has intrinsic value” a casualty within our political and economic orders (Pirson 2017). Human freedom has been reduced to “economic freedom” or “quantitative” freedom. He asserts that “the humanistic community is therefore called upon to conceptualize more intentionally a humanistic system of governance…” (2017: 155).
What I mean by “rule” here is further elaborated below through the discussion of “heuristics.”
These consist in the “action-oriented feature,” the “integrative feature,” the “normative feature,” the “sociality-linked feature,” the “pluralism-related feature,” the “personality related feature,” the “cultural heritage feature” and the “limitation related feature.” I note the very length of this list raises the question of how such a conception-definition is to be used in practice.
Through their study of the concept as it appears in philosophy, theology, psychology and management literature, they propose “to add clarity and bring synergy to the interdisciplinary debate.”
For a positive comparison to Bachmann et al., I suggest the work of Noel (2019, “On the Varieties of Phronesis, Education Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 31, no 3). Like Bachmann she is prompted by the diversity of appeals to phronesis in her field of education to seek some clarity in the big picture. However, rather than turning to an abstract re-conceptualization of phronesis like Bachman et al., she traces the relationships between the different aspects of phronesis a researcher may emphasize and its implication for the sorts of research questions asked and pursued by said researcher. While refusing a reductive definition, this approach at the same time aids other scholars in the effort of seeing how a particular use of phronesis illumines or fails to illumine a practice in some respect or other.
Lest my strong emphasis on tacit knowledge prove misleading, I do acknowledge the value of theoretical work on the topic of phronesis. My own views have been shaped especially by Wittgensteinian voices in the field, such as that of of Joseph Dunne (1993) in “Back to the Rough Ground: Phronesis and Techne in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle.”
Patagonia’s “business library” consists of the three volumes. The Responsible Company presents an overview Patagonia’s business and environmental commitments, while Let My People Go Surfing, discussed at length in this essay, narrates the company’s history in detail. The third part of this trinity, Tools for Grassroots Activists, is both description and how-to manual for groups seeking to organize for environmental causes.
One can find a more exhaustive account in the appendix of The Responsible Co by Chouinard and Stanley. See Chouinard and Stanley 2012:87–112.
For a very helpful recent account of how MacIntyre’s concept of a practice can be used in business ethics, see Sinnicks (2014), “Practices, Governance, and Politics: Applying MacIntyre’s Ethics to Business.” In a way that I believe concords with my discussion of practical reasoning, Sinnicks cautions against the inclination to generalize. Insofar as managing an institution can itself be considered a practice, it must remain attentive to the internal goods of the practices its purpose is to support.
A handwritten copy of Robbins’ seemingly un-institutionalized but highly influential “climbing ethics” can be viewed in the documentary film “Valley Uprising” (Peter Mortimer, Nick Rosen 2014).
In the next several paragraphs, I draw extensively on (Chouinard 2016) pages 98–104.
Koen’s notion of a heuristic (“anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and fallible”) seems to allude to the temptation to try seeing principles as something like physical laws within an orderly cosmos. See note 2
I owe this way of putting it to my colleague at the University of Dayton Dr. Michael Cox.
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Ryan, M.R. Business Ethics as a Form of Practical Reasoning: What Philosophers Can Learn from Patagonia. Humanist Manag J 6, 103–116 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41463-020-00096-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41463-020-00096-5