Jacob Dahl Rendtorff

Basic ethical principles in European bioethics and biolaw: Autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability – Towards a foundation of bioethics and biolaw

This article summarizes some of the results of the BIOMED II project “Basic Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw” (1995–1998)connected to a research project of the Danish Research Councils “Bioethics and Law” (1993–1998). The BIOMED project was based on cooperation between 22 partners in most EU countries. The aim of the project was to identify the ethical principles of respect for autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability as four important ideas or values for a European bioethics and biolaw. The research concluded that the basic ethical principles cannot be understood as universal everlasting ideas or transcendental truths but they rather function reflective guidelines and important values in European culture. The method of the research was conceptual, philosophical analysis of the cultural background of the four values or normative ideas that people use and find important in their existence. Moreover, this was combined with analysis of empirical legal material and policy documents. Also, a number of qualitative interviews with relevant experts were carried out. Another important result of the BIOMED project was the partners Policy Proposals to the European Commission, the Barcelona Declaration, unique as a philosophical and political agreement between experts in bioethics and biolaw from many different countries. The Policy Proposals are reprinted here at the end of the article.

Case Studies, Ethics, Philosophy and Liberal Learning for the Management Profession

Case studies can be an important methodology for ethics and philosophy in humanistic management and liberal education as well as in the social sciences because they integrate a deeper, reflective, philosophical, and ethical understanding of the organization. A case study approach based on philosophy of management contributes to putting into practice the Carnegie Foundation report Rethinking Undergraduate Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession. This approach is both inductive and deductive and very different from a soft Socratic approach to case studies such as the one often used in business schools following the Harvard method, wherein students are supposed to get knowledge through the reading of a case prepared by the teacher or from a business textbook. The aim of the case study is to analyze a concrete case and get general knowledge through the integrated analysis of the different ethical, philosophical, and economic dimensions of the case. This article presents an argument for case studies that highlight ethics and philosophy in the following parts: (1) Introduction, (2) Historical and Philosophical Definitions of Case Studies, (3) The Quality and Structure of the Case Study, (4) Scientific Validity of Case Studies, (5) Application and Use of Case Studies in Philosophy of Management and Ethics of Organizations, and (6) Conclusion.

Ethics in the bank internet encounter: an explorative study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss some ethical issues in the internet encounter between customer and bank. Empirical data related to the difficulties that customers have when they deal with the bank through internet technology and electronic banking. The authors discuss the difficulties that customers expressed from an ethical standpoint.Design/methodology/approach – The key problem of the paper is “how does research handle the users lack of competence in a web‐based commercial environment?” The authors illustrate this ethical dilemma with data from a Danish Bank collected in 2002. The data have been structured by an advanced text analytic method, Pertex (by generation of intentionality of verbal actors from text).Findings – The authors can conclude that the experience of lack of competency in internet banking implies a severe damage on the experience of the ethics of the good life and of the respect for the basic ethical principles of customer autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerabili...

Value‐based management in local public organizations: a Danish experience

In this article the authors discuss the utility of value‐based management on the basis of the case of value‐based management in the Mayor’s office of the administration of the Municipal of Aalborg, Northern Denmark. This was done in response to the pressure on public organizations in complex Scandinavian welfare states. They argue that value‐based management was introduced as an efficient way to make the organization more open to stakeholder expectations and demands, in particular the increasing request for efficiency of public organizations by citizens. Accordingly, value‐based management is a way to make public organizations less bureaucratic and more service‐oriented in a welfare state which is more open to management strategies from private firms. In particular they emphasize the significance of middle managers for the success of the process in organizations. Middle managers are requested to internalize values in their daily work. If this is done value‐based management is an efficient way to improve boths the ethics and the utility of public organizations without transforming them totally in to private market‐driven organizations.

Corporate Citizenship as Organizational Integrity

The chapter presents the notion of organizational integrity as an expression of the ideal moral and political unity of a corporation. We begin with a discussion of the relation between individual and organizational integrity. After this the chapter elaborates the problems of building and maintaining integrity in corporations: the concept of organizational integrity. Moreover, we analyze the dimensions of integrity and values-driven management in relation to dilemmas of leadership. Finally the chapter deals with integrity and managerial judgment in order to provide the basis for dealing with organizational dilemmas in daily practice of leadership. Managerial judgment is based on a required capacity to understand the complex relation between personal and organizational integrity and include all relevant stakeholders in decision-making processes in a fair and just manner. Accordingly, corporate citizenship is an important outcome of integrity management.

Basic ethical principles applied to service industries

This article provides a general framework for ethics in service industries. The argument is that the four ethical principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability can have significance as basic ethical principles that are guiding ideas of business ethics in service industries. In particular, ethical principles are important in the industries of health care and other services that deal directly with human beings. Indeed, ethical principles are important for treating customers, users and consumers of service industries firms, but they also apply to other stakeholders of the service firm. This article shows that the basic ethical principles do not only apply at the individual level, but also get their significance at the organisational level. Thus, the ethical ideas of autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability are very important in order to propose an ethical framework for value-driven management of service industries firms. They are important as the foundation of justice and responsibility in service industry organisations.

E-marketing ethics: a theory of value priorities

This paper presents a framework for treating ethical issues in e-marketing. Business ethics in e-marketing reflects many of the general ethical concerns of marketing. Therefore, we start by recalling some of the ethical problems that confront the marketing profession. On this basis, we argue for more emphasis on basic ethical principles to protect the autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability of human persons and of different stakeholder groups. However, such general concerns must be accomplished with a framework for decision-making by marketers with regard to concrete priorities in the daily work of marketing and advertising in the digital environment. In order to cope with this need for a decision-making frame we propose a formal theory of values that can be the basis for a concrete approach to values in e-marketing. Such a formal theory of the value realm (Hartman, 1967) can be used to make an overview of different kinds of ethical challenges firms face when implementing e-marketing and e-advertising. Eighteen value types and nine value levels, we argue, can be used as a frame with the intent to illustrate ethical dilemmas in e-business.

Philosophy of Management: Concepts of Management from the Perspectives of Systems Theory, Phenomenological Hermeneutics, Corporate Religion, and Existentialism

In this paper, I discuss recent approaches in the theory and philosophy of management of a complex society, namely Denmark, focusing on the concepts of leadership, corporate citizenship, public relations, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and ethics. This is a discussion of philosophy of management in a complex society. The discussion is presented in five sections: 1) the emergence of business ethics in Denmark; 2) the systems-theoretic approach to philosophy of management; 3) the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to leadership and ethics in organizations; 4) corporate religion, existentialism, and Kierkegaard; and 5) a conclusion.

Risk Management, Banality of Evil and Moral Blindness in Organizations and Corporations

This paper applies Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of the banality of evil and moral blindness to risk management, business ethics and organization ethics. The paper investigates figures of banality of evil in organizations and corporations on the basis of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann as the stereotype of the obedient administrator that is unable to understand the moral risk implications of his actions. Thus the paper contains the following major parts: (1) The concept of moral blindness as proposed in Arendt’s philosophy of responsibility and judgment (2) Interpretations of moral blindness, power and domination following from the concept of systemic action in Arendt’s philosophy: Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust), Stanley Milgram (obedience under authority), Philip Zimbardo (The Lucifer effect (3) Discussion of how the concept of moral blindness apply to analyze administrative evil in organizations and corporations in relation to a kind of risk management that is blind to the moral consequences of management decisions (4) Conclusion and perspectives.

Business Ethics, Philosophy of Management, and Theory of Leadership

This article presents the background of the discussions of the relation between business ethics and philosophy of management. The reason for the need for rethinking business ethics and philosophy of management is the many scandals and the crisis of business in contemporary society. The question is whether it is possible to overcome the oxymoron between ethics and business with the point of view that “good ethics is good business”. In order to answer this question we need to rethink business ethics with philosophy of management. From this perspective, the paper addresses the problem of moral blindness in organizations. The extended elements of moral blindness in organizations represent the basis for our need for business ethics. The state of the art of business ethics with utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, discourse ethics and recent approaches to philosophy of management within the analytical and continental traditions need to be aware of this need to rethink business ethics from the perspective of philosophy of management. On this basis the paper proposes a global philosophy of management with cosmopolitan business ethics as a foundation of the concept of the balanced company in international business. A case-study approach based on care evaluation of ethical decision-making and ethical dilemmas in particular companies may help to advance this approach.