Introduction

Michael Walzer is one of the most important political philosophers and social critics of the twentieth century, yet his work has had limited explicit influence on conversations in business ethics. As a field that depends on conceptual resources from other disciplines to remain vibrant, in this paper we make the case that Walzer’s work provides critical insights and useful approaches that can enhance the efforts of those engaged in the project of business ethics. To make our case, we will show how Walzer’s ideas provide a distinctive perspective on the work of the business ethicist and craft a larger view of the field that demonstrates the value of Walzer’s ideas to business ethicists and other scholars of business.

For Walzer, humans are situated beings. “Thick” understandings of their world (e.g. the meaning of particular goods, who I am as a person, what roles I play in my community) are the starting point for reflection as well as how we begin the process of doing ethics. Rather than focusing primarily on the complex and abstract reasoning of the philosopher, Walzer would urge us to start by entering into the disputes people get into in the marketplace—to see ethics less as stylized abstraction and more as everyday disagreements. For it is buried within how we understand the particularities of our life, our world, our goods, that we begin to have thoughtful conversation with our fellow citizens and work toward a more just society. We can certainly introduce forms of abstraction to get us beyond our specific understanding of a particular good or notion of justice, but such notions and their value are contingent on getting the thick understandings right.

Walzer articulates this view in his landmark 1983 work, Spheres of Justice (SJ), a text that emerged when a variety of theories of justice were ascendant in political theory. While there were several notable works in the background for Walzer, it was John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (TJ, 1971) that served as the primary foil for the articulation of his ideas about how we understand and discuss justice. For Rawls, the way to understand justice was to remove identity and particularity: to craft rules and norms that applied no matter who we were as people, something we did “behind the veil of ignorance.” But for Walzer, approaches like this render us detached from the very sources of particularity that are necessary to grasp fully the nuanced challenges and demands of justice itself. Though Rawls’ noble intention was to get to the heart of the matter by setting aside our identity and context, we end up with an impoverished idea that we often have trouble recognizing as our own. In contrast, Walzer argued that particularism, specifically the aforementioned notion that we begin with “thick” descriptions and understandings of what is good, is essential to any coherent and meaningful account of justice.

While Rawls provided the primary clarifying foil to Walzer’s ideas in SJ and in his 1994 response to criticisms of potential relativism in SJ, Thick and Thin (TT, 1994), we argue that the larger issue is the influence of forms of reasoning and theorizing that downplay the particular—the details of human identity and context—and which move us toward more global, abstract and universal ways of thinking about both people (e.g. “homo economicus”) and concepts (e.g. “global business”). Such forms of theorizing are prevalent within business ethics: not only the work of Rawls (see, for example, Cohen 2010; Marens 2007) but an array of other Kantian and neo-Kantian approaches (see, for example, Bowie 2002, 2017; Dash Wu et al. 2012) that have been central to the discipline since its origins. While our focus is on business ethics, Walzer would also take issue with other scholarly work: the writings of economists and management theorists who approach theory in a way that downplays the messiness of human identity and interaction. Rather than engage a sustained critique of particular thinkers, however, we simply want here to illustrate Walzer’s backdrop—to clarify both the positive content of Walzer’s argument and the ideas he wants to avoid.

While we will advance a variety of themes from Walzer’s work that we see as important, we will emphasize three primary claims in this paper: (i) Particularism, or the use of “thick” description, is the starting point for moral reflection; (ii) understandings of justice are plural and begin with local understandings rather than universal norms; and (iii) approaching ethics in this way opens up important practical insights that can enhance our ability to “do” ethics and to create value. In light of these claims, we will show how Walzer’s work helps address three major challenges that have been endemic to the field of business ethics since its founding: (i) how to get ethics into the conversation about business without seem artificial or “oxymoronic,” (ii) how to understand managers both as individual moral agents within an organization and as change agents, and (iii) how to reshape the focus in business away from a strict focus on money and shareholders and toward stakeholders and the process of value creation in organizations (see Freeman and Elms 2018; Freeman et al. 2020; McMahon 2002; Wicks 1995). We will also address some criticisms of Walzer—specifically his alleged relativism and admitted democratic socialism—before moving to concluding thoughts and future research directions.

Part One: Particularism and Thick Descriptions

Much of contemporary theorizing involves searches for common, even universal insights about human beings and their interactions—whether in philosophy, management theory or economics. Part of this, particularly in management and economics, is related to a desire to enable empirical research to uncover law-like generalizations about how the world works (McCloskey 1990; Nelson 2006). If we can understand what is true about humans as such and how they work in the world, then we can craft better norms, structures and institutions that allow us to thrive. Particularly in philosophy, this appears tied to the Enlightenment claims that moral insight comes from universal principles and ideals. Indeed, it was partly a desire to get away from the contentiousness (and bloodshed, especially in Europe) of rival local understandings of justice or moral ideals that provided a stark backdrop to the rise of Enlightenment thought (MacIntyre 1981). Whatever the sources, there are powerful strands in ethics and related theories that want us to get away from the local, particular and detailed (or “thick”) descriptions of people and their context and towards “thin” descriptions of universal rules and ideals.

Against this backdrop and the ascendancy of Rawls’ TJ, Walzer draws our attention back to the importance of the details of life and context—i.e. “particularism” and related thick descriptions that emphasize the local rather than the universal. As Walzer claims, “Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself only thinly on special occasions, when moral language is turned to specific purposes” (TT: 4). If we want to understand human beings and craft a coherent moral account of life, then we need to start in the messiness of history, identity, community and context. Indeed, Walzer would remind us that morality is more the practical tool created by humans searching for ways to collaborate to tackle real-life challenges and threats to their survival than it is the by-product of grand theories and rationally derived norms created by philosophers. We are born into a particular context and we work every day with our fellow humans to find ways to navigate that world: We argue, we share interpretations, and we try to find new ways to get along and make things work better for us and our neighbors (see, for example, Walsh 2007).

This focus on context and the particular manifests in what Walzer terms the “goods” of a given culture: “People conceive and create goods, which they then distribute among themselves.” (SJ: 6). These are socially constructed goods, what he calls “particularist” goods—that is, they derive their meanings from the particular social contexts in which they are created and operate. Their particularity develops locally through social interactions, traditions and mores, religion and habits of a particular group. Walzer’s examples of these particularist goods include “membership, power, honor, ritual eminence, divine grace, kinship and love, knowledge, wealth,Footnote 1 physical security, work and leisure, rewards and punishments, and a host of goods more narrowly and materially conceived—food, shelter, clothing, transportation, medical care, commodities of every sort, and all the odd things (paintings, rare books, postage stamps) that human beings collect” (SJ: 3). Thus, “[t]here are an infinite number of possible lives, shaped by an infinite number of possible cultures” (SJ: 313).

Indeed, because of the wide variety of ways in which humans may choose to live, Walzer invites us to understand the details of history and the nuances of place as a starting point both for understanding what makes us human beings and for developing an account of ethical norms within a given society. Much of the work in SJ and TT is devoted to noting the richness of culture and context and how different people understand similar themes (e.g. death, the medieval cure of souls in Western Christianity—Walzer, TT: 28). It is through our lived, personal experience within culture that we come to have a point of view about the world, which includes and depends upon the larger constructs we use to make sense of it (e.g. reality, truth, beauty).

Part Two: Justice is Plural and Begins with Local Understandings

Just as our understanding of culture and ethical norms ought to be rooted in a thorough, thick and particular pluralism and plurality, so too is justice for Walzer a concept best understood in the plural—as embedded and emergent. For him, rather than a singular idea (e.g. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice—emphasis ours), justice is best understood as complex and embedded in local understandings. As he notes in Thick and Thin: “I came to the basic idea of Spheres of Justice by reflecting on examples... in which the governing principles did not seem to have the universal reach that philosophers commonly look for. The basic idea is that distributive justice must stand in relation to the goods that are being distributed. And since these goods have no essential nature, this means that it must stand in relation to the place that these goods hold in the (mental and material) lives of the people among whom they are distributed (TT: 26).” In short, we not only lack the ability to truly make sense of justice without reference to our context and local understandings, but we also lack the ability to see any such emergent “minimalist” (or universal) notion of justice as “ours” (TT: 23). That is, justice as a way of thinking about the right ordering of things comes out of our own experience of being part of communities and seeing how we understand these and allocate them in particular contexts.

From this core insight about justice being emergent and contextually bound, Walzer develops the idea of the “spheres” of distributive justice, from which the title of his book derives. Because all goods and the norms for their distribution are socially and locally defined, what is an important social good in one society or culture may not be critical at all in another. Even what one society means by fairness, equality, property, community and exchange, for instance, may be quite different from another society’s definitions. He argues, “A given society is just if its substantive life is lived…in a way faithful to the shared understandings of the members…Justice is rooted in the distinct understandings of places, honors, jobs, things of all sorts, that constitute a shared way of life. To override those understandings is (always) to act unjustly” (SJ: 313–4).

In the same way that Walzer is highly reticent fully to embrace universalizable notions of justice, he is also highly critical of any society that exalts one good above others. In contrast to Rawls, who proposed one principle of distributive justice,Footnote 2 Walzer suggests that there are multiple spheres of justice associated with the multiple social goods present in societies and sub-cultures. All standards, including justice and injustice, are socially defined relative to cultural and historical contexts. Justice, or distributive justice, is variously interpreted depending on the context or sphere in which it functions. Still, Walzer suggests some general principles by which to judge these distinct understandings. These spheres of justice as Walzer designates them are associated with what he calls “complex equality.”

Within each sphere and its social goods are various forms of justifiable or fair distributions, each of which entails a different notion of equality. Each of us as individuals participates in various social goods and thus various forms of justice. Political economies have several overlapping spheres of social goods, each with their own distinctive reach and normative standards of distributive justice. For example, some think of democratic capitalism as a sphere defining the social good of free markets, free exchange, private property ownership, and (in theory at least) equal opportunity. In that sphere, the distributive principles are equal freedom, due process, equal opportunity and the assumption of equal respect and equal rights for everyone. Job opportunities, placement on sports teams and even political offices should be allocated on criteria such as equal opportunity, field-relevant qualifications and merit. Welfare, on the other hand, should be distributed on the basis of need (SJ: 94). We also have other sets of social goods, such as the social good of free elections where offices should be open to all and are based on the egalitarian principle of one-vote-per-person.

Though he does indeed see this as the ideal approach (with which we agree fully), Walzer acknowledges that in most societies there are some social goods that are dominant. The problem with this is that a dominant social good can create injustices in two ways: (1) by encouraging monopolies of that social good and (2) by distorting the fair distribution of other social goods.

As a remedy, Walzer proposes what he calls an “open-ended principle” (SJ: 20), which we interpret to mean a principle that could be used to evaluate a social good in any society. The principle states:

No social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x. (SJ: 20, Walzer’s italics).

The details of how this open-ended principle plays out in analyzing the social goods in our society or in another is somewhat clarified in Walzer’s writing with his proposal of three distributive principles that reflect the open-ended principle and both evaluate and critique the dominance of any one social good: free exchange, desert, and need.

“Free exchange” seems an obviously desirable distributive principle, but in practice we often see its abrogation: human trafficking (where the “goods”—humans being trafficked—are not free), buying votes, monopolies and insider trading.

“Desert” is a pluralistic idea; it underscores the notion that what is awarded in one society might not be valued in another. According to Walzer, “desert seems to require an especially close connection between particular social goods and particular persons” (SJ: 24). For example, illy caffé, when developing the cultivation of good coffee beans in Brazil (which we will discuss later in this paper) discovered that awards for the best coffee beans was as or more important to local Brazilian farmers than monetary awards—which suggests a different logic applied to thinking about how markets work. To have a coherent conception of desert and to give people that to which they believe they are entitled in a given market context requires a localized understanding of what this term means.

“Need” is also a complex distributive principle. While many of us working in developed nations define need on the basis of income (usually in dollars), that equation is too simple. Those which are considered “basic needs,” such as living on more than a dollar a day, have to be translated depending on the society. For example, economic exchanges for the Sub-Saharan Maasai are usually a matter of barter. Thus, water for their cattle is their most basic need, not money (see Cunningham 2020). For companies working in this area, understanding a bartering economy is crucial both to succeed and to respect this way of thinking.

Walzer then concludes that if a social good violates any of these criteria, then it is an excessively dominant social good and creates a monopoly for that good. As such, these principles become tools in business ethics to make moral judgments across cultures, which indicates that Walzer is not a relativist. (We will take up this charge later in the paper). Given these principles, the particularism of social goods is only quasi-autonomous, and the open-ended principle can be applied to transnational commerce as well as politics.

Practical Insights for Doing Business Ethics

These theoretical insights offer a different way of thinking about our field, and call for a more systemic approach to ethics. In other words, the world in which we engage is composed of complex sets of often (but not always) overlapping social goods and various formulas for distribution. This implies that ethical theory should also be reconsidered as sets of overlapping ethical theories and theories of justice where insights from, say, Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Dewey overlap. Each offers interesting insights, but no one theory dominates (or should dominate) our thinking—and the value of these ideas is related to how well they help us understand justice and notions of ethics that emerge from local conceptions.

Walzer’s work can also enhance our ability to do business ethics in a global marketplace. Particularism implies that free enterprise as Western industrialized or post-industrialized nations practice it defines a particular set of social goods and should not be exported willy-nilly in its Western format to other cultures. Such simple exportation may violate local cultural norms, may lead managers to make critical assumptions that don’t hold and may miss opportunities to create value with others. Particularism of social goods implies that there are various forms of political economies and even various formulations of capitalism or free enterprise—not merely the traditional Western industrialized system. These variations on free enterprise are a result of particular social, political and cultural contexts. We usually assume that economic growth, education and poverty alleviation are goods, but they have to be localized with respect for religions, localized values, cultural norms of trade and gift-giving, educational variables, hierarchies and customs of ownership. Moreover, in many societies community and family, rather than individualism and money, are dominant social goods.

Research that acknowledges the particularism of these spheres—and the underlying social goods and various forms of distributive justice—is key to facilitate an informed practice of capitalism across the globe and to acknowledge that markets take many forms rather than just one model of global capitalism. If a corporation approaches expansion of its economic opportunities in what appears to be an alien culture, it should be wary and cognizant of the different social goods and forms of justice that may have been in place for a very long time.

For instance, advocates of universal education caution that any effort to apply the global ideal of education for all requires understanding of the mores and values of particular communities (Banerjee and Duflo 2011). Such caution was evident when the German pharmaceutical Bayer purchased an Indian company CropScience that grew and harvested flax seeds, a product that Bayer needed for some of its chemical production (Subramanian et al. 2010a–2010b). It turned out that there was a long tradition in the various Indian villages that grew the flax seeds that children as young as six years old would harvest them. These children thus often fell behind in school and eventually dropped out. But part of Bayer’s corporate mission was a general principle never to hire or to condone child labor. So, Bayer was faced with the option of pulling out of this market or coming up with a solution that satisfied local farmers, accomplished Bayer’s mission and respected these centuries-old traditions that were part of the social goods of these communities—all while upholding Bayer’s own principle of never condoning child labor in any of its operations.

Under a notion of simple equality and economic power, Bayer could have imposed the requirement of forbidding the use of child labor in these farms. Or, it could have simply accepted this practice as part of rural Indian culture and tradition. Instead, Bayer approached the problem with the kind of nuanced appreciation of the local complex spheres that Walzer champions. The company tried to understand the local system through the eyes of a “local” participant and to envision a solution that would both work on the ground and satisfy larger corporate mission. They initially paid the farmers supplements for hiring adult harvesters and subsidized families who depended on the children’s wages for their family income. As it turned out, the adult workers were more efficient harvesters, so the farmers were more satisfied than before. Then, it worked with local Indian educators to provide remedial education for the children so that the children could return to school and succeed there without falling behind. Thus, Bayer has its flax seeds, children receive education, and all parties are satisfied with the outcome without morally compromising (Subramanian et al. 2010a–2010b).Footnote 3

This case illustrates that a particularist approach, one that keeps in mind the idea of complex equality so that businesses adapt their approach to local mores and respect the diversity of local cultures not only is theoretically more nuanced but also has practical value. Rather than allowing us to assume our universalist ideas of commerce and justice apply everywhere, it reminds us of the need to understand context and the particularities of how things work in different parts of the world, as well as the need to craft new ways of operating within that context. It moves us away from the instinct crudely to apply simplistic “bottom line” notions to how we approach commercial cultural lines, and closer to the core building blocks of business as a human activity—getting people to come together to decide how they will cooperate and make each other better off. This is, in short, a recognition of justice’s spheres and its considered, careful and well-crafted distribution in action. Walzer reminds us that there is great power in beginning from this particularist staring place and letting shared norms and practices emerge from dialogue and collaboration, rather than assuming our notions of justice and our approach to commerce will work anywhere.

Unlike Bayer, however, firms aren’t always inclined to this particularist approach. As explored in a recent paper on Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSI’s), global shoe juggernaut Nike adamantly declared that it would cease all utilization of child labor on their supply chains (Soundararjen et al. 2019). But this declaration, while as noble as Rawls in its sweeping spirit, assumed wrongly that there was a consensus across their supply chain around the problematic nature of child labor and how important it was to do something about it. Nike not only assumed that their norm against child labor was a universal norm: They also didn’t engage with their supply chain partners to understand other assumptions and implications that would come from enforcing this norm and how their supply chain partners brought different conceptions of justice to this MSI effort. As a result, members of the supply chain decoupled from the vision—either by actively opposing it or by failing to enforce it. Had Nike begun with greater suspicion of their universal notions (however well-intentioned) and taken the time to communicate, compromise and collaborate with their supply chain partners on the front end, then they would have been far better positioned to gain the support they sought (Soundararjen et al. 2019).

At Least Two Concerns

We turn now to two issues that have recurred in criticisms of Walzer and may lead some of our colleagues to either discount or reject his work in the context of business ethics: his alleged relativism and his use of the label “democratic socialist” to describe himself.

The First Concern: Walzer’s Alleged Relativism

Because of the localized character of social goods and distributive principles Walzer proposes in SJ, he has been criticized as a relativist. To carry that argument to an extreme, this social relativism might allow free commerce to behave locally, thereby possibly providing a rationale to defend bribing, polluting, employing child labor or discriminating against women or local defined “outsiders” —so long as those were the social norms of that community. As Cohen writes in his review of SJ, “Like other communitarians, Walzer holds that membership in communities is an important good, that the primary subjects of values are particular historical communities, and, what is most important, that there is nothing more to the correctness of values for a particular community than that those values are embraced by that community.” (Cohen 1986, p. 457) If Cohen is correct in his reading of SJ, this leads to a conclusion many would disagree with—namely, that one cannot make intercultural value judgments. Consequently, one cannot make judgments about the behavior of multinational corporations.

However (and as we noted earlier), even in SJ Walzer qualifies this particularism with his “open-ended principle” by arguing that monopolies, the disrespect for autonomy of particular cultures, neglect of the needy and the domination of the tyranny of one social good (e.g. money in our society) are all criteria by which we can evaluate a particular domain or culture.

In TT, Walzer more explicitly addresses this issue of relativism. There he argues that running through the thickness of each sphere of social goods—and, on a larger scale, running through each culture—is a “thin theory of the good” or what he also calls “moral minimalism.” The thin theory is not so much about positive good or social goods, but rather about consensus on the “bads.” For example, Walzer points out that thousands of pages have been devoted to various theories of justice, and to date we cannot define that term definitively with any universal consensus. All the same, he points out that we can come to a great deal of consensus on what constitutes injustice or unfairness, such as not respecting equal rights or cheating others (TT, especially 4–6). Thus, Walzer surmises, there are a set of agreed upon, although not always practiced, moral minimums—the “bads” to which nearly everybody subscribes. Murder, rape, torture, gratuitous harm, disrespect for equal rights, not addressing preventable diseases and violence, however defined locally, are all considered evils, and alleviating these are considered as worthwhile projects.

We propose that moral minimums are candidates for making cross-cultural judgments, although we agree with Walzer to be careful to avoid the term “absolutes.” Moral minimums have a chance to be agreed upon by most human beings—for example, the right not to be excluded from voting in a democratic society. And more recently we have added at least one new minimum: the environmental minimum not to harm or deplete further the natural environment. (This is a minimum that was not widely considered or discussed as recently as a century ago.) So, Walzer’s notion of moral minimums is very useful, particularly in making cross-cultural or global moral judgments and an open-endedness that allows for new thinking and social change. We see this interpretation of his work as a way of using his ideas to introduce nuance and attention to the particular without committing to a problematic relativism.

Interestingly, Walzer introduces two new provisos in TT to distance further his views from relativism: The shared meanings of social goods and their embedded forms of justice, and human autonomy. In SJ, Walzer argues that various forms of distributive justice are relative to their social meanings as defined by the particularism of social goods (SJ, Chapter 1; TT: 26). In TT, he adds that “justice is constrained by a reiterated minimalism… a critical perspective and a negative doctrine [of what constitutes injustices]” (TT: 26). He adds further that social meanings, as defined by these various forms of distributive justice, must be truly shared across a society in a democratic fashion, not by tyranny or coercion. Social meanings change—but still, the criterion for their acceptability is both moral minimalism and shared agreement (TT: 26–28). A second proviso has to do with human autonomy: “Autonomy is a basic distributive principle, itself entailed by the differentiation of goods” (TT: 32). This autonomy derives from his notion of the thin self, but it also responds to his critics who could find no evidence of this in SJ. Human autonomy appears to be a universal basic norm underlying all human behavior, particularized social goods and shared meanings of justice (although Walzer avoids the term “universal”).

Because of the cross-cultural dimensions of ethics (and thus business ethics), these provisos are invaluable in making judgments across differing collections of social goods while preserving the idea of the particularism of these goods and their meanings. However, are these provisos in contradiction with Walzer’s arguments in SJ? He claims not, and perhaps he is intimating that these provisos were implicitly underlying his arguments in that early book. Whether or not that is the case, they relieve the alleged relativism of Walzer’s positions.

The Second Concern: Walzer as a Socialist

The second concern around Walzer we want to alleviate is that of his self-labeling as a democratic socialist. Walzer contends that modern socialism is, or should be, a social democracy with “democratic participation, market regulation, and welfare provision [for those in need]” (Walzer 2015a, b, p. 38). Thus, what distinguishes Walzer’s social democracy from ours is a more strident aim at greater income equality and a stronger desire to soften our attachment to money, something closer to what we see in Scandinavian countries. The question of income inequality has become a central concern of our time and a threat to the viability of capitalism—a view often shared by both critics and defenders of mainstream capitalism (Freeland 2012).

Although Walzer does sometimes write as an avowed democratic socialist, he defends perfect markets. Indeed, he writes, “The more perfect the market, the smaller the inequalities of income will be, and the fewer of failures” (SJ: 116). On the other hand, he contends, “a radically laissez-faire economy [what he calls “market imperialism”] would be like a totalitarian state, invading every other sphere, dominating every other distributive process. It would transform every social good into a commodity” (SJ: 119–20). These two statements are not contradictory, however. Walzer implies that a perfect market is where there is open and free competition and free exchange without the leverage of unequal wealth. A laissez-faire economy without basic regulations, on the other hand, would be unable to prevent unsavory individuals and companies from competing unfairly.Footnote 4 Thus, we would argue that while Walzer uses the language of democratic socialism, his views place him broadly within contemporary conversations about capitalism (rather than stridently opposed to markets and capitalism). In addition, regardless of how we might characterize his own views on the question of capitalism and markets, scholars can readily utilize and adapt his ideas to conversations about business ethics without incorporating his democratic socialist views.

The First Challenge for Business Ethics: Ethics as a Natural Part of the Conversation About Business

Now that we’ve addressed two prominent criticisms of Walzer’s work and demonstrated the ways in which his rich theoretical resources can be of use in business practice, we now turn to show how those same theoretical insights are of tremendous help to overcome chief challenges in the field—indeed, the particular community—of business ethics. Herein, we will introduce additional conceptual resources found in Walzer’s work.

Fusing ethics and our conceptions of business rather than leaving them altogether separate has been a huge challenge for business ethics, one that lives with us to this day some 50 years after the field’s founding—what we call the “Separation Thesis” (Freeman 1994). We still regularly hear the bad jokes: “I didn’t know business had any ethics,” “[business ethics] must be a short course,” or “I heard that was a theoretical subject”—all usually told with a wry smile, as if the joker is sharing something new and witty. On top of that, whether it is films like The Corporation that describe corporations as sociopaths or cartoons that ask executives to “please wash hands after every business deal,” there are ample additional reminders that many people see business as lacking ethics altogether (Bakan 2003).

Despite the consensus on the challenge itself, there has been considerable debate within the business ethics community about how we get ethics into business—or how we make business more ethical—whether that be about how we articulate firm purpose or the duties of managers in publicly traded corporations (e.g. Goodpaster and Halloran 1994; Boatright 1994). Walzer would relate to our pain on both scores and would argue that this is exactly the kind of problem his work was designed to avoid.

The primary issue here is less our conception of ethics as such and more the narratives about business we have allowed to emerge and thrive. In short, if we allow economists to strip away all the human dimensions of business as a complex human activity—done by people to serve and benefit others, as well as themselves—and turn business practice into the mathematics of money, then it isn’t a surprise that “ethics” and “business” have become dissociated. In other words, the more economists reduce the human element to a set of abstract assumptions that they can model (e.g. humans as rational self-interested maximizers), the further they get from the phenomenon they seek to study (McCloskey 1990; Nelson 2006). As we can see, the attempt is to universalize complicated insights about the human condition that texture economic activity such that those complexities don’t have to be considered. Walzer would argue that this turn in economics is deeply problematic and reflects a profound misunderstanding of the activity which they seek to describe. Even worse, as these narratives gain a foothold in our collective understandings, they become self-fulfilling prophecies loaded with assumptions that become harder for both individuals and managers to identify—let alone question, revise or reject (Zingales 2012).

We can see how accepting these blunders of economic theory compounds the problem: Walzer would note that this also gives rise to views of ethics that appear largely detached from the context of business. If we begin with a normative vocabulary that is detached from context or which begins with abstract philosophical theory, then the challenge will always be how we make these ideas fit on the ground in context—even when they don’t fit at all. For example, if I assume my sole job as a manager is to maximize profits for shareholders, then claims of corporate social responsibility will not only appear like deeply misplaced good intentions: They will border on endorsing theft (e.g. Friedman 1970). In contrast, Walzer helps us to see that business starts with particular organizations, people, products and real-time collaboration. If we start with Walzer and this more three-dimensional understanding of business, then the Separation Thesis never comes up. Instead, we can see the Separation Thesis as the natural by-product of approaches (especially in economics, but also in universalist philosophy present in business ethics) to theorizing that are optional and problematic in their universality.

The Second Challenge: Managers, Ethicists and Organizations as Moral Agents and Change Agents

Another major challenge within the field of business ethics is to develop an account of managers as more than agents of shareholders: that we also see them as moral agents and as people of creating moral change from within organizations. Once again, Walzer’s work bolsters a robust view of moral agency and the high levels of accountability to which organizations should hold themselves.

Thick and Thin Selves and Accountability

Notions of the self and assumptions we make about them are critical subjects of inquiry in business ethics. We hold managers and organizations morally responsible. But such attributions of responsibility assume that these individual and collective agents are capable of free choice, self-propelled action and behavioral change. In TT, Walzer’s account provides both a cogent and useful theoretical lens for making such attributions and an approach that allows for a rich and contextual understanding of the self and choice.

More specifically, Walzer wrestles with the idea of the self to develop his idea of the philosopher as Social Critic. As he claims, our selves are “thick,” constructed and evolve from our social and historical situation and its accompanying narratives. We change as we grow up, become educated and age. We each play multiple roles, such as mother, daughter, teacher, professional, patient, learner, friend, mentor, and with each of those roles we have a variety of changing interests (see Werhane 2018). We also have various socially defined identities with values and principles which also evolve over time. However, as Walzer notices, each of us is the subject of the evolution of our thick selves. This subjective self is what he calls the “thin self.” But this thin self is just that: thin. It is the subject of all of my ideas, behaviors and roles, but it is a self that I cannot catch or define in terms of those ideas, behaviors and roles. It accounts for the continuity of our self as subject of all of what I refer to as “my” actions. And it is that thin self, the continuing subject of my roles, interests and behaviors that one holds morally responsible.

As such, the thin self becomes the source of self-criticism: “I deliberately take a stand outside myself detached, removed, looking on from a distance” (TT: 86). This self-critical posture is the “thin” self in action, and it accounts for the fact that individuals can step back from their practices and study, evaluate and redirect their mind-sets and prevailing dominant logics.

The notion of the “thin self’ is important not merely for self-understanding and social criticism: It also describes how companies can step back from and redirect their missions, goals and dominant logics to innovate. This conclusion is made possible because organizations are created by and made up of individuals. While a dominant logic of a company may control the corporate culture and decision-making, the idea of the thin self implies that any manager or executive (or a group of managers) can, at least in principle, step back to study and critique their organization. Of course, many organizations and their managers do not take such actions; instead, they are mired in organizational cultures that can dominate human choice. But from Walzer’s idea of the thin self, habitual behaviors and an obedience to a dominant organizational logic is neither inevitable nor inescapable. Just like individuals, companies can change, improve, take on global contexts and environmentally challenging agendas or consider the social impacts of their operations. Thus, an organization, like an individual, is accountable for its choices and behaviors. As such, it can recognize this accountability, evolve and reform.

To be clear, the thin self is merely the abiding subject that accounts for the possibility of individual and organizational self-evaluation. The actual activity of self-evaluation emerges from the interaction between the thick contextualized individual or organizational agent and its perduring identity. Nevertheless, Walzer’s analysis provides a basis and justification in business ethics for holding organizations as well as individuals morally responsible—and also for accounting for organizational redirection. It also reminds us that any notion of a thin self is utterly dependent on those thick characteristics—a natural continuation of Walzer’s approach to assessing the needs of distributive justice in a given community.

To illustrate this principle of responsibility, the recent issues associated with Boeing and the software on its 737 MAX shows a company mired in a dominant logic that prioritized meeting production deadlines and profitability over engineering excellence. After two crashes killing 376 passengers and public outrage, we now find numbers of engineers and managers critiquing this corporate culture. But not one engineer who had spotted the issues in the malfunctioning software nor one manager, even those who found the dominant corporate culture stifling for engineering excellence, blew the whistle on these practices prior to the public and governmental investigations (Kitroeff 2020). Yet, as Walzer’s work suggests, any one of these individuals or groups of individuals could have spoken up much earlier, and those tragic accidents could have been averted (e.g. had they invoked the thin logic of the need to protect humans). The thin self provides an important explanatory notion that undergirds our ability to avoid being trapped in the organizational logics in which we operate. It explains how it is we can step back and assess instances like the Boeing case with a fresh lens and helps makes sense as to why certain standards of accountability are essential to the healthy function of organizations.

Change Agents and Social Critics

In addition to his insights on the thick and thin selves, Walzer’s writings on social criticism (1987, 1988, 2002) provide an avenue for thinking about the underexplored role of business ethicists as social critics, as galvanized recently by calls for them to become more active in social debates about ethical business (e.g., Abend 2014; Berman and Van Buren 2014; Walsh 2015). Sonenshein’s 2005 analysis of Walzer’s theory of social criticism and its application to the business ethicist as an internal social critic is one of the few works to begin to tap into the value of these ideas.

According to Walzer, the social critic is best defined not as an inventor or discoverer of truth or moral values, but rather as an interpreter. Indeed, “we are all [naturally] interpreters of the morality we share” (Walzer 1987, p. 29). The social critic is an insider—a critic within her own society. But she interprets her society and its values from what he calls a “critical distance” that has both an emotional and intellectual dimension (Walzer 1987: p. 36). This does not and cannot entail stepping back altogether from the society in which we live since that is, indeed, impossible. What it does entail is taking an impartial perspective as far as is possible, viewing the subject matter from a skeptical point of view or as a fresh observer. As Walzer claims, "Social criticism is less the practical offspring of scientific knowledge than the educated cousin of common complaint. We become critics naturally, as it were, by elaborating on existing moralities and telling stories about a society more just than ours, though never entirely different than, our own. Nor is there a society, waiting to be discovered or invented, that would not require our critical stories" (Walzer 1997, p. 65). As he notes, “[C]riticism is most properly the work of “insiders,” men and women mindful of and committed to the society whose policies and practices they call into question—who care about what happens to it” (Walzer 2002, p. xi). We see this posture as a potentially valuable counter-argument to the prevalence of more abstract and impartial reasoning using universal principles that has characterized much of business ethics (e.g. the widespread influence of Kantian and neo-Kantian theory in business ethics). For Walzer, the critic is enmeshed in a context—a social narrative that she must evaluate from within.

Sonnenshein’s paper (2005) is one of the few works to tap into these ideas and note their value. Relating Walzer’s view of the social critic to the business ethicist, Sonenshein writes, “Internal social criticism focuses on how members of a business organization debate the meanings of their shared traditions for the purpose of locating and correcting hypocrisy. Organizations have thick moral cultures that allow them to be self-governing moral communities. According to this theory, members of a business organization act as internal social critics when they evaluate and regulate their practices by appealing to shared understandings about the purpose and nature of their business organization” (Sonenshein 2005, p. 475). In other words, part of the task of business ethics is using the espoused values or mission of an organization to operationalize and realize those values and that mission. Much of the work of the business ethicist is to be enmeshed in the work and realities of business and to participate in how people within the firm wrestle with understanding their responsibilities—including what they should do each day. For Walzer, this work starts with the local and with the thick notions of meaning, purpose and relationships—things that emerge from ordinary life in organizations.

If we start with a Walzerian perspective, it becomes evident that companies can be their own social critics, too. For example, the upscale Italian coffee company illycaffeFootnote 5 found itself having to do just that. Thought the company traditionally purchased coffee beans on the commodities market, they found that they had to reject nine out of ten sacks of coffee beans found on the market to match its selective brewing processes and meet the rise in demand. So, rather than settle, illy it changed its mindset and strategy. In Brazil it began offering rewards and prizes for the best beans. It created partnerships with the winning growers, paying them above market prices for their best beans and teaching them the roasting processes. The growers, having lived their lives in rural communities without previous contact with their end-buyers, found themselves treated as true partners and part of an ongoing goal to produce the best beans possible. This was important for the growers and for illy, because it now could accept and use a much larger portion of the available beans (Rauscher and Andriani 2009).

This idea fits nicely with some of the important aims of business ethicists and scholarly thinking on the topic. As Abend (2014, p. 9) writes, “Not only are [business ethicists] assigned a moral enhancement job and expected to make a moral difference, given an accepted moral causation account. They may also provide that moral causation account in the first place. Or else, develop it, reinforce it, and help get it socially accepted. They are in the cultural business of designing, articulating, circulating, validating, and legitimating public understandings and accounts about social reality.” This is precisely the job of the ethicist as social critic from a Walzerian point of view.

Writing from the corporate responsibility perspective, Berman and Van Buren (2014, p. 10) argue, “We…suggest that management scholars, rather than seeing themselves as distant from the objects of their studies in a dispassionate way, instead view their research as value laden—as indeed all social science research is. Management scholars have a stake in healthy organizations and a healthy society; to the extent that scholars believe that capitalism makes both possible, they should be interested in the broader debate about what makes for ‘good capitalism’… Taking an explicit value stance is not contrary to sound theorizing or empirical work; rather, it recognizes that values are implicit in all academic work within management, and some values are more salutary for human and societal flourishing than others.” Walzer’s views on social criticism, as Sonenshein (2005) contends, help to legitimate the notion that making sense of values is both inevitable and core to how we as business ethicists contribute to the critical conversation about business.

Part of Walzer’s challenge is for us to get closer to the world and language of business and to de-emphasize abstract concepts and reasoning as the core of our value-add. This is not to say careful reasoning and theory have no value; rather, it is to highlight that business ethics academics are invited to engage with people operating in real organizations, making choices and creating products. Walzer would encourage us to step out of the “ivory tower” and into the local grocery store, to find ways to engage in discussions about business that resonate with stakeholders and foster a richer conversation about business. He would encourage us to attend to the concerns and anxieties of stakeholders and provide them with resources that allow them to give voice to their issues and reshape the narrative of business.

Business Ethicists as Engaged Critics

Finally, Walzer challenges business ethics academics to move beyond arms-length analysis and toward direct, tangible forms of advocacy and engagement with business on the ground. Many in the field see ethics as a place where academics are most effective when they remain neutral and focus on framing issues and challenging people to do their best thinking rather than advocating for specific choices or points of view (e.g. Wicks and Glezen 1998). However, it is evident that while Walzer sees this kind of critical thinking as vital—and that a focus on careful thinking rather than advocacy of specific positions may be useful—there are times when academics should see themselves as involved in the debates on which they write (Walzer, ISC 1987, p. 39). Walzer refers in particular to the value of “immanent critique” in TT (1994: 61): “The work of the critic, when it is maximalist work, is also local and particularist in character.” (see also Elms et al. 2011, p. 3).

Whether drawing attention to discrimination, human trafficking, the sex trade, global warming, war or any number of other issues, academics thereby perform “immanent critique” and therefore ought to engage directly the phenomena about which they write. They are citizens and human beings who are called to speak and to act, not just to offer dispassionate analysis from a vantage point well removed from their subject matter. Indeed, Walzer says “The central argument of Company is that criticism is most properly the work of ‘insiders’, men and women mindful of and committed to the society whose policies or practices they call into question—who care about what happens to it.” (Walzer, TCC 2002; xi – Walzer’s italics: see also Walzer, ISC 1987, 38–39).

One such example of this approach was made in compelling fashion by some authors at the Academy of Management meeting during a panel on sex trafficking (Social Issues in Management Division, August, 2014). While the authors gave a paper and aimed to write up their findings for an academic publication, they used their time (and the paper itself) both to draw attention to a topic they thought important and to encourage the faculty in the room to engage this phenomenon: to move beyond detached academics doing analysis, to take ownership and to find ways to create change in the world. There are dangers with such a posture: the limits of our expertise, the need to maintain some level of detachment to retain credibility, or where and how we can add the most value. Still, not to do so when one is capable is itself a questionable stance. Walzer’s approach draws attention to significant tensions for business ethics academics and invites us to re-think our posture toward the world in ways that may be uncomfortable for us, yet also may make us better at what we do and closer to whom we are called to be.

The Third Challenge: Reshape Business Away from Strict Focus on Money and Shareholders to Stakeholders and Value Creation

The final core challenge of doing business ethics we highlight is creating a viable way of talking about commerce that isn’t so focused on money and shareholders. While both are important, neither is the source of wealth creation, nor do they draw our attention to the things that enable the process of wealth creation to occur. Walzer’s work, particularly in the focus on the local and emergent dimensions of life, invites both a suspicion of these more abstract notions as core ways of talking about business and a deep criticism of the role money plays in our society.

As Walzer contends, money has become a dominant good that often dictates the other social goods that are important to our culture (SJ: Chapter 4). In his view, strictly monetary wealth should not be a justification for the ability to have influence or power in other spheres of social life: using money to buy votes, public offices, reputation or children. These social goods are ideally what society has designated as “not for sale.” In a democracy, political office should be determined by free elections and not for sale to the highest bidder. Human beings are never for sale. Despite these ideals, Walzer argues that money has become the dominant good in American society: “When money carries with it the control, not of things only but of people too, it ceases to be a private resource. It no longer buys goods and services on the market; it buys something else, …where buying and selling are [ordinarily] ruled out.” (SJ: 121).Footnote 6

According to Walzer, money should be a means only to engage in trading in commodities that do not have deeper ethical, social or political implications (SJ: Chapter 4). This is not a new position, and if we return to one of the “fathers” of free enterprise, Adam Smith, someone often cited by Western free-enterprise economists, we will find that this claim is echoed in the original eighteenth century idea of free enterprise that he introduced. Smith argued that money is only a means to expand the economy, not an intrinsic good. While advocating the social good of wealth creation, Smith demonstrated that wealth can be created: It is not a static commodity. And money, which is not a static end in itself, is a means to create more wealth. Wealth is created by the division of labor, industrialization and free markets. Critical to this dynamic is reinvesting capital into the economy. Money is just a utilitarian means to create economic flourishing—it has no value other than what it can buy, sell or invest in (Smith 1776).

Smith’s view aligns closely with Walzer’s conception of money. According to Walzer, this idea has been compromised in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by valuing money as an end and measuring value strictly in terms of costs, prices and income. Money, not free exchange, has become the dominating force across almost every social good in a variety of societies. “Social goods have social meaning, and we find our way to distributive justice through an interpretation of those meanings. We search for principles internal to each distributive sphere…the disregard of these principles is tyranny” (SJ: 19). Thus, each social good should be evaluated in terms of its meaning, rather than by how much it is worth in financial markets. Voting, for example, is an egalitarian phenomenon that should allow each individual, no matter his or her status or political views, to participate in political life. Thus, the basis for voting is the norm of the equal right to express one’s political views. Buying votes would clearly violate that norm and undermine the very underlying notion of why there are elections and that for which voting exists. Similarly, critiques can be offered of insider trading, a common but illegal market phenomenon that distorts free exchange by giving advantages to those who are privy to certain information before it is made public (e.g. allegations from March 2020 that at least one prominent Senator sold his stock holdings on fears of Covid-19 ravaging our economy while at the same time publicly assuring people everything was fine).

Anderson (1995) explains this position. She argues that “If different spheres of life, such as the market, the family, and the state, are structured by norms that express fundamentally different ways of valuing people and things…[T]here can be some ways we ought to value people and things that can’t be expressed through market norms” (Anderson 1995, xiii. See also Stark 2019, pp. 143–5).

There is much to be gleaned from Walzer’s (and Smith’s) analysis of money. Currency is a powerful tool—a means to create wealth that is invaluable for economic growth and value creation. But if money becomes an end in itself, it fosters greed, hoarding, fewer investments in new businesses and worse—valuing human beings in terms of their wealth or possessions rather than their contributions or inherent worth. Moreover, in many societies nonmonetary social goods are primary. Thus, for Walzer it would be a misuse of power to inflict the notion that money is the most important social good on a global scale. Not only that, but such an infliction is only possible—and indeed encouraged—when we view distribution of justice from a universalist lens. For what easier way is there to “distribute” justice than to assent to monetary value instead of other forms of value? But again, distributing “justice” in this way ultimately becomes unjust in its rendering of legitimate social goods in every society as secondary and less valuable than the mere possession of money itself (SJ: 103).

This is an important insight as ethicists evaluate global commerce. These two thinkers invite contemporary ethicists to challenge these latter theories of money and remind us that investment, not hoarding, is the strong source of economic growth. If Walzer’s arguments are on target, then the ethics of value creation, not of monetary wealth, should be the focus of free enterprise. Today there is widespread criticism of the power of money and its intrusion into many facets of contemporary life (Karabell 2018). Walzer provides an important larger perspective to inform why such judgments may be appropriate—and the capacity for more fine-grained analysis of when and where money should have influence.

Conclusion

We have examined many threads of Michael Walzer’s work to demonstrate the relevance and under-utilized potential of his work for research in business ethics. A Walzerian perspective highlights that moral reflection begins with the particular and that understandings of justice are plural. This stance is both a critique and contrast to the work of theorists like Rawls and other neo-Kantians whose work has been highly influential in the business ethics literature. While acknowledging that particularism and pluralism may be messy and sometimes complicated to work through, Walzer’s account highlights that such work is unavoidable if we really want to grapple with ethics. The work of the ethicists is to craft a richer and more compelling narrative about business and how it enhances the lives of all of us. These ideas are essential to analyzing global economics and transnational corporate performance in local settings. Walzer helps us to avoid the absolutist “itch” to focus inquiry primarily on universal norms and ideals, and to consider the local and particular as being important—and perhaps even more significant as a source of insight and reflection. He would bring us further into the trenches of everyday life and focus our inquiry there—not to allow complexity to provide a smoke-screen for companies to evade responsibility, but to see the richness of what business can be when we look at it with a human face and see it in the context of communities.

In particular, we focused on three challenges posed to business ethics that Walzer’s concepts help to address: (i) how to get ethics into the conversation about business without seem artificial or “oxymoronic,” (ii) how to understand managers as both individual moral agents within an organization and as change agents, and (iii) how to reshape the focus in business away from a strict focus on money and shareholders and towards stakeholders and the process of value creation in organizations. Finally, we identified two important critiques of Walzer’s work (relativism and socialism) and showed why these concerns should not get in the way of using his work to advance future theory in the field.

Trajectories for Future Work

We turn now to offering further suggestions for developing new theory that builds on ideas we explored in this paper and other related ideas from Walzer’s work. Indeed, Walzer invites researchers to engage in both the conceptual and practical discussion of business, particularly in forms that bring a more local and human dimension that highlights the variety of understandings of how markets work. He urges scholars to attend to how business and markets are built upon context, values and understandings—both as an important source of insight and as a counter to deontological views and neo-classical economic and management theories that minimize or remove concern with the particular.

First, we see great value in the Social Critic and how this role can be utilized within business ethics. It is a posture that emphasizes the work of interpretation and engaged analysis, as well as a back-and-forth dialogue between thick and thin notions of the self, to examine critically life within organizations. Such work draws our attention to critical issues like what factors are important in helping stakeholders feel like they are “members” of an organization—as well as the kinds of things that lead them to feel disenfranchised or marginalized by the firm. How can we utilize this contextual starting point to better understand the basis for engagement, shared meaning-making and fostering a stronger sense of membership to create value for particular stakeholders and the firm? There is also considerable opportunity to explore the role of business ethicists as scholars, teachers and advocates from within the frame of the Social Critic—a posture that likely takes many in the field outside their comfort zone and into a more engaged and activist role.

Second, in the context of growing economic inequality and widespread concerns about the disproportionate influence of money to share contemporary life, Walzer’s sharp critique of the dominance of money and the need to understand the limits of certain goods—both within and across various spheres—becomes especially relevant. His work could prove vital in moving our contentions about money and inequality beyond our initial revulsion and into a more nuanced analysis of what the proper use of money should be—and where and why finances ought not to matter. This kind of internal critique, grounded in a rich understanding of our existing institutions, is not only more compelling but also more theoretically robust. And, because of the tight link between the dominance of money and universalist perspectives, such a critique will go a long way in inviting business ethicists to start with the particular—for if we no longer have either the explicit or subconscious option of assenting to money as the ultimate good, our turn to the particular values of a given community will be that much more unobscured.

We end with a theme with which we began the paper: Philosophy provides part of the wellspring of ideas that make business ethics a rich and vibrant mode of inquiry. Walzer’s work illustrates this potential, and he provides a wealth of resources to help the field address some of its biggest challenges. Our aim has been not only to show the relevance of Walzer’s thought to business ethics and to illustrate specific ways in which his views could be used to contribute to the inquiry—but also to encourage our colleagues to embrace the task of bringing Walzer further into the mainstream of business ethics. We have only touched on Walzer’s vast work by focusing on key parts of his Spheres of Justice (1983), Thick and Thin (1994) and Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987) and related works. We also note the latent possibilities of drawing on his other well-known and highly regarded work on “Dirty Hands” (Walzer 1973) and “Just War” (Walzer 1977/2005/2015), particularly for better understanding the moral and psychological challenges of leading organizations and the toll doing so takes on managers.Footnote 7 We note that some our business ethics colleagues are already working on these additional texts (see, respectively, e.g., Hess 2017; Alzola 2011), and we hope to see further such exploration. Our present text provides ample illustration of the potential of Walzer’s contributions to the discussion—and the importance of continuing to find new resources in an array of disciplines to enrich the field of business ethics.