1.1 Reflection

It is an honor to be asked to contribute to this book series. It affords me an opportunity to reflect on my body of work over the past half-century and to identify patterns among the books, articles, book reviews, and case studies that comprise my curriculum vitae (see Appendix 1). More importantly, it allows me to highlight contributions that have been appreciated and to share some that have been less noticed (see Appendix 2). My hope is that the reader will benefit as much from this extended reflection as I have benefitted from writing it, and that this book can serve as a useful departure point for future work in the field of business (or organizational) ethics.Footnote 1

1.1.1 The First Twenty Years [1975–1995]

The title of this book, Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good, is intended to capture a progression of insights surrounding the three main subjects that have guided my career of teaching and research in the field of applied ethics. I began seeking an understanding of the role of conscience in the lives of individual persons with the conviction that such an understanding would be helpful if it were applied to institutions.

This was something of an “inversion” of the strategy of Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Book II. Socrates says of his friends Glaucon and Adeimantus:

They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them what I really thought: that the enquiry would be of a serious nature and would require very good eyes.Footnote 2 (Plato, p. 185).

Socrates went on to analogize the soul of the person to the structure of a republic, implying that finding justice in the larger entity would help to discern justice in the smaller (the person).Footnote 3

Inverting this idea, my approach has been to look at the idea of virtue in the individual person and to try to discern its implications for institutions, including especially business corporations. To paraphrase Socrates, “I propose that we enquire into the nature of responsibility and irresponsibility, first as they appear in the individual, proceeding from the lesser to the greater and comparing them.” I have called this strategy the Principle of Moral Projection.

In the earlier manifestations of this projection strategy, there was a surge of scholarly opinion in the direction of expanding the moral agenda of corporations to include not only stockholders but also, in various ways, stakeholders. This “expansion” of corporate concern appeared to follow the analogy with individual conscience—based on what we will call in Chap. 2 the moral insight. It drew upon expectations that we have of one another for consideration, respect, honesty, and integrity (Goodpaster 1991).

Christopher D. Stone, then law professor at the University of Southern California, appeared to have come to a similar strategy, but from the point of view of jurisprudence:

If people are going to adopt the terminology of ‘responsibility’ (with its allied concepts of corporate conscience) to suggest new, improved ways of dealing with corporations, then they ought to go back and examine in detail what ‘being responsible’ entails—in the ordinary case of the responsible human being. Only after we have considered what being responsible calls for in general does it make sense to develop the notion of a corporation being responsible. (Stone 1975).

Nevertheless, there were skeptics: those who doubted that organizations could ever be morally analogous to individual persons (Ladd 1970) and those who doubted that organizations should ever be morally analogous to individual persons (Friedman 1970). In the “early decades” of the field of business ethics, these skeptics required not only comprehensive counterarguments but also a reasonable portrait of what the idea of “corporate conscience” might look like if it were implemented in the competitive arena of business practice (Goodpaster 1991). Thus, my journey from conscience to corporate conscience called for an understanding of the meaning and value of orienting, institutionalizing, and sustaining ethical values as an organizational attribute (Goodpaster 2007). In Chap. 3, I call this shift the institutional insight.

1.1.2 The Second Twenty Years [1995–2015]

Eventually, the arc of my teaching and research (shifting the focus from conscience to corporate responsibility) had to confront a different kind of question: If the projection from individual conscience to corporate conscience was to be actionable in society, it called for a robust idea of human dignity and the common good. I was troubled by the view that business ethics for the corporation simply amounted to maximizing the “good” of the stakeholders, with little attention to the meaning of “good.” It is tempting to take refuge in a less controversial “interest satisfaction” view of the good for both stockholders and stakeholders. This is often referred to as a “thin” theory of the good. After all, defenders of this view argue, we live in a highly pluralistic society with little agreement about a “good life.” But it does not take much effort to imagine misguided interests (and/or rights claims) on the parts of any and all of the groups identified as stakeholders. And then what? Does not the imperative to maximize interest satisfaction lose some or all of its normative hold on us (Goodpaster 2010)?

If we are to invoke an idea like “the common good” and give it substantive meaning, rather than relegating it to a slogan that all can salute simply because it is vague or empty of meaning, we need to have an idea of a whole person and extend that idea to all persons.Footnote 4 Thus, my journey from conscience to the corporation called for a second movement, a movement from the idea of corporate conscience toward a “thicker,” more substantive understanding of the common good. In Chap. 4, I refer to this new awareness as the anthropological insight.

In addition to these reflections on the ingredients in a normative ethics for business (conscience, corporations, and the common good), I needed to offer some reflections on a “delivery system” for those ingredients. In other words, I needed to reflect on my teaching, both in the business school classroom and in corporate executive education. In Chap. 5, I share my thoughts about the case method and certain additional methods I have used with executives. What emerged from these reflections was what I called the Socratic insight.

1.1.3 The Years Since [2015–2022]

During the last 8 years, perhaps not coincidentally during the severe political polarization occasioned by the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, in addition to reflections on a “thick” rather than “thin” account of the good (and therefore of the common good), I have witnessed with alarm a new tendency on the part of business organizations to invoke “corporate responsibility” and “business ethics” in defense of practices that objective observers would describe as “political orientation” or simply “partisanship.” Corporate examples abound, but based on a 2019 Axios-Harris Poll (Nather) the main takeaways were:

  • The big tech companies do better with Democrats than Republicans, at a time when they’ve been accused of being biased against conservatives. Even the low-ranked Twitter was slightly more popular among Democrats.

  • The most polarized companies were the Trump Organization—which scored highly with Republicans and dead last among Democrats—and Target, which did better among Democrats than Republicans.

  • When you include independents, Wegmans was the only company that made all three top 10 lists.

  • Independents’ favorite company was Amazon.

  • The least favorite companies had privacy scandals (Facebook) or other scandals (Wells Fargo), are going bankrupt (Sears), or cut off their customers’ HBO (Dish).

What this illustrates, in my opinion, is a kind of outsourcing or “alienation” of corporate conscience to either an ideology or a political party whose purpose is to win elections and achieve political power. But corporate responsibility as corporate conscience calls for “in-sourcing” decision-making criteria and basing them on the mission and core values of the organization.Footnote 5 This trend in many ways runs the risk of undermining rather than reinforcing the aims of business ethics as a field—of offering counterfeits for conscience. I will have more to say on this subject in Chap. 6, but suffice it to say now that the politicization of business decision making can infect the formation process of business decision makers in both business schools and company programs (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good

Full size image

1.2 The Organization of this Book

Here is a brief summary of the chapters of this book. As will be evident, each chapter reveals—in retrospect—an important insight that advanced my thinking on the main theme of the chapter.Footnote 6

Chapter 2—Conscience and the Moral Insight begins with reflections on the source of ethics itself as a discipline, eventually exploring the meaning and development of the concept of corporate responsibility as it unfolded during the first 20 years of my work in the field of business ethics. Here I discuss the meaning of business ethics in relation to the study of ethics generally, and conscience more specifically.

Chapter 3—Corporations and the Institutional Insight elaborates further on the Principle of Moral Projection and introduces the organizational counterpart of the moral insight for individuals, namely, the institutional insight. In addition to tracing the elements of conscientious decision making from personal to organizational manifestations, this chapter also traces the elements of certain obstacles to conscience, from personal to organizational manifestations. One very central such obstacle is a pathology that I have called teleopathy.

Chapter 4—The Common Good and the Anthropological Insight reflects on the second 20 years of my work in the field of business ethics, a realization that normative ethics, in order to be truly normative (and non-relativistic), must explore more robust “theories of the right and the good” than had been offered in the late twentieth century (Brenkert and Beauchamp 2009; Goodpaster 2010, 2012, 2017 [reprinted as Appendix 2c of this book]).

Chapter 5—Business Ethics Education and the Socratic Insight shifts the focus from the subject matter of business ethics as a field to the pedagogical point of view. If business ethics is incorporated into the curricula of the nation’s business schools (and into the curricula of the nation’s executive development programs), it matters how that is done. Indeed, if business aspires to be a true profession, an institution in the classical sense, the moral formation of its future leaders must be initiated and developed by a faculty and administration that are fully committed to this calling. In the course of this discussion, the Socratic insight emerges as a way to put the ideas surrounding “conscience, corporations, and the common good” into action.

Chapter 6—Concluding Reflections: Then and Now In the concluding chapter, I will (a) provide a summary of the journey described in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5; (b) reflect on my earlier work indicating my discoveries and changes in thinking; (c) discuss problems that have arisen during the eight years since my becoming Emeritus Professor; and (d) share some thoughts about the future of the field of business and applied ethics in the face of a severe polarization of political values in the U.S. and even abroad.

Chapter 7—Afterword Offers a retrospective summary of the book as a whole and an image of the Sower, who in my view is a compelling portrait of the educator in the field of applied ethics.

Appendices At the end of this book, in Appendix 1, I have included my full curriculum vitae. In Appendix 2, the reader will find reprinted three of my articles that have received less attention than most of the others. I offer them here with the permission of their publishers to round out the retrospective and prospective thoughts occasioned by the invitation to write this volume.

  • “Toward an Integrated Approach to Business Ethics,” Thought, Volume 60 (June, 1985), pp. 161–180.

    This article offers an interpretation of responsibility in business ethics on three scales or levels of analysis—the person, the organization, and the economic system. Utilizing innovative work in mathematics on “fractals,” I suggest both descriptive and prescriptive implications of this conceptual model. Executive Education in the academy and in corporations might benefit from this imaginative understanding of the multi-leveled moral ecosystem within which the leader must lead. As with all ecosystems, “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner 1971).

  • “Tenacity: The American Pursuit of Corporate Responsibility,” Business and Society Review (118:4, 2013), pp. 577–605.

    In this article, corporate responsibility in the American experience is articulated under the concept of tenacity, regarding the possibility that business responsibility in a (relatively) free market economy is possible. The article offers three basic convictions that underlie that tenacity. First, the Checks & Balances Principle tells us that there are checks and balances in democratic capitalism which give us confidence that the pursuit of economic goals will be moderated for the common good. Second, the Principle of Moral Projection shows that there is good reason to consider the corporation not only as a legal person under corporate law but also as a moral person. And, last, the Moral Common Ground Principle reflects that there are shared moral values ascertainable by well-developed consciences in individuals and in corporations.

  • “Human Dignity and the Common Good: The Institutional Insight,” Business and Society Review, (March, 2017), pp. 27–50.

    In this article, I develop the idea of the “institutional insight” as a pathway to two foundational values for applied ethics: human dignity and the common good. I explore—but do not offer a definitive analysis of—these two values, which I believe are critical to the progress of business ethics (indeed to the progress of applied ethics generally). In several previous articles (Goodpaster 1991, 2009, 2012, 2013), I have alluded to this theme, but here I hope to have shown that human dignity and the common good underlie both (1) management’s fiduciary duty to shareholders, and (2) management’s obligations to “stakeholders.” Indeed, it may be that the frequently observed tension between the latter two normative paradigms can be resolved only by engaging in the comprehensive moral thinking afforded by the institutional insight.