Abstract
Few would deny that some central questions in business ethics are normative. But there has been, and remains, much skepticism about the value of traditional philosophical approaches to answering these questions. I have three central aims in this chapter. The first is to defend traditional philosophical approaches to business ethics against the criticism that they are insufficiently practical. The second is to defend the view that the appropriate methodology for pursuing work in business ethics is largely continuous with the appropriate methodology in moral and political philosophy more broadly. And the third is to offer a brief characterization of how we should think about the substance of business ethics, in light of my arguments about its proper aims and methodology.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a broader question that can be asked about whether it makes sense to consider all of the work that is currently referred to as “business ethics” as part of a single, unified field of scholarly inquiry. I take no position on this question here.
- 2.
There is, in my view, good reason to count a much broader range of normative questions among those that fall within the scope of business ethics, including, for example, questions about the obligations of consumers (Hussain 2012; Ferguson and Ostmann 2018; Lawford-Smith 2018; Barry and MacDonald 2019; Hassoun 2019; Berkey 2021c; Kingston 2021), questions about the appropriate structure and limits of markets within a society (Satz 2010; Sandel 2012; Brennan and Jaworski 2016), and questions about international trade justice (James 2012; Risse and Wollner 2019).
- 3.
Individuals can, of course, take positions on these questions without engaging in philosophical inquiry—they can, for example, defer to religious texts or leaders, or views that are widely accepted in their culture. Openness to philosophical inquiry, broadly understood, however, is essential for the kind of debate about the complex and important issues that work in business ethics, and ethics more generally, should help us address.
- 4.
- 5.
In the remainder of this chapter, I use the term “business ethics” to refer only to the subset of scholarship that is typically referred to by that label that addresses normative questions about the proper conduct of agents in business contexts.
- 6.
It is worth noting that while the first of these suggestions regarding what business ethicists ought to aim to do in their work clearly lies within the domain of normative scholarship, the second just as clearly does not. Insofar as his aim is to critique the way that normative scholars have approached their work in business ethics, then, the second suggestion is clearly out of place, since normative scholars are generally not trained to produce work that has as its aim motivating people to behave in ways that they know, independently, are morally required. In addition, this would be an unusual aim to have in producing scholarly work in any field of inquiry. It seems instead to be a more suitable aim to adopt if one is, for example, acting as a consultant to a corporation and in a position to shape the decisions of managers. Indeed, to some extent Stark’s critique can be understood as suggesting that much scholarship in business ethics is problematic because it does not, and perhaps cannot, play a central role in satisfying the aims that an ethics consultant might reasonably adopt. As I will argue, however, there are strong reasons to reject the view that normative scholarship, whether in business ethics or any other domain, should be constrained by aims of this kind.
- 7.
Joseph Monast (1994) also interprets Stark in this way, though he is not always entirely careful to distinguish profitability from personal self-interest either.
- 8.
He notes, for example, that several scholars have claimed that the primary (and appropriate) goal of ethical management is to prevent the enactment of regulations that would constrain firms’ business activities (presumably in ways that would limit their profitability while protecting or promoting other values).
- 9.
Stark does not deny that individuals, including managers and others acting in business contexts, are sometimes motivated by altruism (1993a, pp. 43, 46). But he does at least at times suggest that approaches in business ethics that do not take a significant degree of self-interested motivation as given, and as a constraint on what individuals can be obligated to do, must be rejected (pp. 40, 43, 46).
- 10.
Despite this, in the same section Stark does characterize the view that he is describing as concerned with the effects of ethical behavior on firms’ “bottom line,” and quotes another scholar who claims that there will tend not to be any conflict between the courses of action that would be chosen by those concerned about social responsibility and “long-range profit considerations” (1993a, p. 39).
- 11.
- 12.
This is especially important to note in relation to Stark’s discussion, since he claims that other areas of professional ethics, such as medical and legal ethics, have done significantly better than business ethics when it comes to offering practical guidance to the relevant professionals (1993a, pp. 38, 44; 1993b, p. 12).
- 13.
Heath claims that properly structured incentive systems will tend to align managers’ personal interests and the interests of shareholders, but rightly notes that this alignment of interests, where it exists, is “accidental and irrelevant from the moral point of view. In the case of a conflict, the obligations simply trump the relevant set of interests” (2004, p. 72). In other words, if managers are obligated to shareholders to maximize profits, this obligation does not depend on its also being the case that maximizing profits best serves the manager’s personal interests. A manager who blames an improperly designed incentive system for actions that he took that served his own interests well but were disastrous for shareholders has certainly not provided a compelling justification for his conduct, even if it is true that the incentive structure was poorly designed.
- 14.
- 15.
For roughly, this interpretation of Stark, see Monast (1994, pp. 506–508).
- 16.
Consider, as just one example, elected officials in the United States prior to 1865 who considered the interests of slaves to be relevant to what they ought to do when acting in their professional capacity. These officials rejected and acted contrary to prevailing norms regarding who counted as constituents whose interests they had a professional duty to represent, and contributed to an effort to replace those norms with morally superior ones. However few such officials there actually were who were motivated by the relevant moral considerations, and however unlikely it might have been that most would act on the recommendation generated by the moral argument, it is deeply implausible (to say the least) that any argument in favor of the view that elected officials have an obligation to consider the interests of slaves could have been justifiably rejected as failing to provide sufficiently practical guidance, since it was too deeply in tension with most officials’ existing understanding of their professional responsibilities. I assume, of course, that Stark and other critics of philosophical approaches in business ethics would not endorse this claim. It is not clear, however, that they can reject it if they accept that arguments and views in business ethics are insufficiently practical if, and because, they imply obligations to act contrary to most managers’ existing understanding of their professional responsibilities.
- 17.
- 18.
It is worth noting here that in the context of criminal law, it is widely accepted that prosecutors ought to aim much more directly at justice in their professional conduct than defense attorneys. This is because it is widely accepted that it is significantly more important, morally speaking, to avoid convicting and punishing innocent individuals than it is to ensure that the guilty are convicted and punished. If this is correct, then prosecutors adopting a policy of prosecuting every case that they believe that they can win as vigorously as possible will tend to generate an unacceptable number of convictions of the innocent.
- 19.
Identifying the normative purpose of the legal profession as simply “justice” may not be sufficiently precise, since it might be argued that it is not part of the role of lawyers, in their professional capacity, to advance the cause of, for example, distributive justice as this notion is typically understood by political philosophers (see, for example, Rawls 1999). Nonetheless, it seems to me that even if this is correct, the claim that the normative purpose of the legal profession is to promote justice can plausibly be given a more precise formulation on which it would refer to a narrower range of individual and social interests.
- 20.
In addition, this seems to be a plausible view. After all, pharmaceutical firms that produce drugs that significantly improve individuals’ health seem clearly, at least in that respect, to be doing something consistent with the normative purpose of business.
- 21.
Of course, there are plausibly morally relevant values apart from individuals’ interests. But it is worth noting that Donaldson and Walsh want their view to be consistent with a requirement that agents in business consider the interests of non-human animals, and perhaps even the value of non-sentient components of the natural world (2015, pp. 198–199).
- 22.
It is worth noting that in cases in which doctors do make choices, in their professional capacities, that stand to affect a much wider range of individuals and interests, most people will accept that it can be wrong for them to ignore these individuals and interests and aim only at promoting the health of their patients. For example, imagine that by providing a treatment that one of her patients needs in order to avoid losing the use of one of her legs, a doctor would release a pollutant that would cause several innocent bystanders to lose the use of one of their legs. It seems clear that the doctor ought not provide the treatment, despite the fact that this entails failing to best promote the health-related interests of her patient. The norm according to which doctors ought to aim exclusively at promoting the health-related interests of their patients seems plausible, then, only because cases of this kind do not arise often. These cases highlight, however, that this norm cannot be fundamental, and at most happens to provide reasonable guidance in typical cases.
- 23.
Joseph Heath employs a version of the professional ethics approach in developing his well-known “market failures approach” to business ethics (2004, 2006, 2014). Heath’s view does screen out values that are not captured within his efficiency-based account of the justification of business as a profession. Because of this, I believe that his view cannot capture all of the obligations of business professionals. For a critique of Heath that appeals to the value of justice that, in my view, is correct but insufficiently far-reaching, see Singer (2018). I criticize Heath’s view on the ground that it cannot count the interests of non-human animals in Berkey (2022).
- 24.
I argue for a view of this kind, focusing on justice in particular, in Berkey (2021b).
- 25.
This is, roughly, the method of “reflective equilibrium” described initially by John Rawls (1999, pp. 18–18, 40–45), and widely employed in moral and political philosophy.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Richard Shell, Alan Strudler, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful written comments.
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Berkey, B. (2022). What Should Business Ethics Be? Aims, Methodology, Substance. In: Faldetta, G., Mollona, E., Pellegrini, M.M. (eds) Philosophy and Business Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97106-9_2
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