Are Business Ethics Relevant?
This paper suggests that “the relevance of business ethics” has often been a question of utility, which considers profits, cultural concerns, and social capital regarding organizational health. There are, however, underlying suspicions regarding the relev
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Are Business Ethics Relevant? David W. Miller and Michael J. Thate
Abstract This paper suggests that “the relevance of business ethics” has often been a question of utility, which considers profits, cultural concerns, and social capital regarding organizational health. There are, however, underlying suspicions regarding the relevance of business ethics. In corporate contexts, “ethics” is often conflated with compliance, and becomes the domain of compliance and risk management. This statement is not to disparage compliance officers or their departments. Rather, the point is that there are limits of assigning “ethics” and the valuation of actions as “ethical” to a place or office within corporate contexts. Such approaches will necessarily be reactive to and driven by law, code, and policy. Another suspicion concerns the relevance of one’s personal ethics within an “ethical field.” An ethical field is where diverse ethical agents, with differing ethical contexts and convictions, inhabit space. The effect and influence of one’s ethical actions or convictions depends on where one lives within a given ethical field. This field approach to ethics stresses that an agent’s ethical actions and convictions are enmeshed within social relations. And, of course, power relations within any given field are always asymmetrical. The paper emphasizes that religious ideas can help shape and inform the ethics of peoples and business cultures. Attentiveness to these dynamis is an impactful way to engage business school students and business people to think afresh about ethics as both character and culture. Thinking about ethics through the lenses of the “Right”, the “Good”, and the “Fitting” can help guide people through ethical grey zones, informing them toward richer and wiser ethical decisions.
The reach of the financial crisis during the 2007–2008 subprime-mortgage disaster remains difficult to overstate. The domino effect and eventual toll on governments, global and domestic financial systems, social institutions, communities, families, and individuals has proven historic. The catastrophe left many questioning how such a thing could have happened. Who and what ideology were at fault? Or was this some inevitable outcome of late capitalism? Amidst all the finger pointing and D.W. Miller (*) • M.J. Thate Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 P. Rona, L. Zsolnai (eds.), Economics as a Moral Science, Virtues and Economics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53291-2_11
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posturing of “moral outrage,” an interesting body of literature surfaced questioning the role of Business Schools within the crisis (Lorsch et al. 2016). Kelley Holland suggested that, “with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.” (Holland 2009) This naturally lead to many discussio
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