Edwin M. Hartman

The role of character in business ethics

There is good reason to take a virtue-based approach to business ethics. Moral principles are fairly useful in assessing actions, but understanding how moral people behave and how they become moral requires reference to virtues, some of which are important in business. We must go beyond virtues and refer to character, of which virtues are components, to grasp the relationship between moral assessment and psychological explanation. Virtues and other character traits are closely related to (in technical terms, they supervene on) personality traits postulated by personality psychologists. They may therefore be featured in respectable psychological explanations. But good character fits no familiar psychological pattern. A person of good character is sufficiently self-aware and rational that his or her virtues are not accompanied by the vices that psychologists find usually associated with them. A course in business ethics can help develop this self-awareness, which a good life in business requires.

Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy, and Organizational Ethics: A Response to Phillips and Margolis

Phillips and Margolis argue that moral philosophy is a poor basis for business ethics, but their narrow view of moral philosophy would exclude Aristotle, for one. They criticize me for assimilating states and organizations in using the Rawlsian device, but they put too much faith in Rawls’s distinction between states and voluntary organizations and pay too little attention to the continuities between them. Their plea for a conceptually autonomous ethics for organizations I interpret as reasonable and largely compatible with my own stated opinion.

The Commons and the Moral Organization

A complex organization is in effect a commons, which supervisory techniques cannot preserve from free riding. A corporate culture strong enough to create the requisite community-minded second-order desires and beliefs may be morally illegitimate. What morality requires is not local enforcement of foundational moral principles?a futile undertak- ing?but that the organization be a good community in that it permits the disaffected to exit, encourages reflective consideration of morality and the good life, and creates appropriate loyalty. One might well suppose that the last thing we need is another metaphor for organizations, but I offer one all the same: the organization is a commons.2 There is a moral and administrative obligation to preserve this commons; and to do so, I claim, requires the manager to create a certain kind of corporate culture.3 But how can a powerful corporate culture be compatible with the autonomy of those it affects? It would seem to be a brainwashing device. A morally legitimate organization turns out to have certain features one would expect, but some also that one might find surprising. Among other things, it generates self-fulfilling belief, appeals to the emotions, and commands loyalty. It takes a strong corporate culture to do that, and to preserve the commons.

Socratic Ethics and the Challenge of Globalization

We have reached a rough moral consensus in the field of business ethics. We believe in capitalism with a safety net and enough regulation to deal with serious market imperfections. We favor autonomy for individuals and democracy for governments, though not necessarily for organizations. We recognize the rights of citizens and the different rights of employees. We respect a variety of possible sets of values, and so countenance a distinction between public and private. In other words, we are capitalists, pluralists, and liberals. But globalization will force us and businesspeople who share our views to deal with significant stakeholders who do not. The 21st century will see the accelerating pace of globalization. The great challenge for business ethics, for its philosophers and its scholars of business, will be to identify and advocate morality that takes adequate account of globalization, and that in so doing avoids untenable parochialism without falling into relativism.

Aristotle and Werhane on Moral Imagination

Aristotle holds that virtue is more important to ethics than is following principles, though principles count for something. To act virtuously requires finding a mean between two bad extremes, such as cowardice and foolhardiness. This in turn requires the ability to see which details of a case are salient – or, in Aristotle’s terms, what the essence of the situation is. The enabling faculty Aristotle calls perception. Werhane’s account of moral imagination is similar. Perception can go wrong, according to Aristotle, when we apply the wrong principle to a situation because we do not see the situation for what it really is. This Werhane calls failure of moral imagination.