Timothy L. Fort

The role of business in fostering peaceful societies

Introduction Part I. The Plausibility of Connecting Business and Peace: 1. The role of business in fostering sustainable peace 2. Balances of power and mediators of justice Part II. Current Standards and their Amenability to Peace: 3. Corporate governance and sustainable peace 4. Ethical business behavior and sustainable peace Part III. Two Illustrative Issues: Gender and Ecology: 5. Gender, voice and correlations with peace 6. The ecological challenges of war: the natural environment and disease Conclusion.

The Role of the Corporation in Fostering Sustainable Peace

This Article demonstrates that there is a plausible, conceptual relationship among corporate governance, business ethics, and sustainable peace. First, the Authors begin by outlining the benefits of and protests against globalization and the reciprocal benefits between geopolitical entities and economic activity. The Article then details specific historical events that foreshadow patterns in the relationship between business and sustainable peace. In looking more closely at those patterns, the Authors argue that through economic progress and mitigation of rivalries in the workplace, multinational corporations can contribute to sustainable peace. Thus, if this argument is correct, the stakes increase dramatically for corporations to consider these issues in their governance practices and for governments to create legislative frameworks to encourage such responsible practices. The Authors propose that incorporating attributes of peaceful societies with current successful corporate governance regimes will help to achieve both economic progress and social harmony. The Article concludes that the future will offer increasingly precise corporate models that contribute to the reduction of bloodshed.

Nigerian business practices and their interface with virtue ethics

This paper concerns the interface of a business ethics theory (virtue ethics) with an example from Nigeria where a communitarian notion of ethics appears to hold. We will argue that while communitarian virtue ethics theory assists in describing the ethical context of Nigerian business, Nigerian business also demonstrates why a certain kind of communitarianism is required in order to foster notions of individual autonomy. This kind of communitarianism, referred to as a mediating institutions approach, can also be a normative structure demonstrating how communities can treat other communities

A Review of Donaldson and Dunfee's Ties That Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics

This article reviews Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfees new book Ties That Bind. The article argues that the book is a helpful elaboration of Donaldson and Dunfees Integrative Social Contracts Approach, particularly with regard to their specification of hypernorms. The article also presents Donaldson and Dunfees argument with regard to how the hypernorm of necessary social efficiency applies to bribery and raises questions about the extent to which human moral behavior might be hardwired.

Religion and Business Ethics: The Lessons from Political Morality

The issue of whether religious belief should be an appropriate grounding for business ethics raises issues very similar to those raised in asking whether religious belief should be an appropriate grounding for political morality. In light of that fact that writings in political morality have been a common resource for contemporary business ethics, this paper presents contemporary arguments about the role of religion in political morality while noting the relevance of these debates for business ethics.The paper takes the position that rather than excluding religion from public morality, political morality (and business ethics) ought to take an inclusive, ecumenical approach. To argue this position and to present fully a range of literature normally not studied in business ethics circles, the paper presents and critiques the major contemporary authors in the field of political morality and contrasts them with the inclusionists who seek to keep public grounds open for all moral perspectives.

On Social Psychology, Business Ethics, and Corporate Governance

This paper is a response to a recent colloquy among Professors David Messick, Donna Wold, and Edwin Harman. I defend Messick’s naturalist methodology, which suggests that people inherently categorize others and act altruistically toward certain people in a given person’s in-group. This paper suggests that an anthropological reason for this grouping tendency is a limited human neural ability to process large numbers of relationships. But because human beings also have the ability to modify, to some extent, their nature, corporate law can organize small mediating institutions within large corporations in order to take ethical advantage of this grouping tendency. Within a corporate law taking seriously a mediating institution’s formulation of business communities, a virtue ethics approach can be integrated with a naturalist approach in a way that fosters ethical business behavior while mitigating the dangers of ingrouping tendencies.

How Relationality Shapes Business and Its Ethics

Just as Michael Porters “five forces” provided a practical analytical tool for describing the forces that shape competitive strategy, so business ethicists ought to provide business leaders with a workable framework for understanding the sources of ethical obligations. The forces that shape competitive strategy vary according to time and industry, but are anchored in an ultimate criteria of profitability. Similarily, ethics can use a set of analytical categories that identify the relevant forces to business ethics on the basis of relationality.This paper first argues that relationality based on naturalism is the primary, plausible value for ethics. Second, it adapts a tripartite dialectic from scholars William Frederick and Michael Novak to describe the relational categories with which business must contend. Third, it uses these forces in a way similar to Porters competitive forces to offer an analytical language familiar to managers in order to characterize business ethics.

Teaching Business Ethics: Theory and Practice

Business ethics teaching can be improved when ethicists integrate the ethical theories they apply to business with the organizational design of the course. By utilizing three techniques – implementing a Total Quality Management-style survey and review, “nominating” and “electing” class virtues, and telling personal stories of moral action – classes can be organized to operate by the social contract, rights, stakeholder, and virtue theories that dominate business ethics literature. Classes then become laboratories for the practical articulation and application of the theories as well as providing “real” examples of the theories in action. This methodology produces benefits for the particular class and for the development and refinement of the theories themselves.This paper describes each of the three pedagogical techniques; and then explicitly relates them to these leading business ethics theories to demonstrate how the integration can lead to a “community” seeking and discovering moral truth in the classroom.

Business and Naturalism A Peek at Transcendence

Bill Frederick’s work calls on business ethicists to consider religion as well as nature. Because there are naturally wired religious impulses in human beings and because of the fairness of including normative approaches meaningful for business people, Frederick suggests that the “R” in CSR4 should represent religion. This article takes up the theme in terms of the emerging field of naturalist theology, particularly (although embryonically) as stated by theologian Paul Tillich. Doing so creates (a) connections between “God as Life” and nature and (b) linkages of the notions of symbol, culture, and transcendence. In addition to avoiding the socalled “naturalistic fallacy,” this integration can foster ethical business behavior.

Instruments of Peace? How Businesses Might Foster Religious Harmony

What is the role of international business in this dilemma? How and why do international corporations maximize value beyond core strategy and partners through corporate responsibility? This informative and accessible resource expands the readers’ understanding of the ways in which profit maximization, value creation and community benefit interconnect. How to respect the wider business settings and communities, the environment and encourage peace? Is this just another dream? This book clearly provides a starting point for upstream mitigation, in which collective action allows disruption to be avoided at its very roots. It shows the way into responsible business, as a downright condition for an enlightened self-interest for all parties to pursue.