Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics
- PDF / 746,212 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 225 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics Santiago Mejia1 Received: 6 January 2020 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Socrates’ inquiry into the nature of the virtues and human excellence led him to experience Socratic ignorance, a practical puzzlement experienced by his recognition that his central life commitments were conceptually problematic. This practical perplexity was not, however, an epistemic weakness but a reflection of his wisdom. I argue that Socratic ignorance, a concept that has not received scholarly attention in business ethics, is a central aim that business practitioners should seek. It is what a truthful, thorough, and courageous inquiry into their professional roles and commitments leads to. It wakes them up from the moral complacency engendered by organizations, forcing them to become much more critical of their day-to-day activities and more intentional about living virtuously. It curbs the corrupting potential of authority positions and prevents the tendency of subordinates to routinely conform to sanctioned norms and expectations. Finally, it opens up novel and creative moral avenues and provides a promising model to deal with the conflicts posed by our globalized and increasingly polarized world. Keywords Socratic ignorance · Socratic wisdom · Virtue ethics · Socrates · Socratic examination “The point of Socratic irony is not simply to destroy pretenses, but to inject a certain form of not-knowing into polis life. This is his way of teaching virtue. [...] It is constitutive of human excellence to understand— that is, to grasp practically—the limits of human understanding of such excellence. Socratic ignorance is thus an embrace of human open-endedness” Lear 2011, 36.
Introduction Socrates in the Business Ethics Scholarship Business ethicists have typically conceived of Socrates as a mere precursor to Plato and Aristotle; he has not been recognized as a thinker on his own right. His distinctive stance, characterized by a wisdom that emerges from his recognition of his ignorance, has barely received scholarly attention in the field of business ethics, although this is what Socrates is most famous for (Nails 2017). The few scholars in the field who have written about Socrates have focused on two features of his legacy: his * Santiago Mejia [email protected] 1
441 East Fordham Road (Hughes Hall, 5th Floor), New York, NY 10458, USA
methodology and the centrality that he gave to the care for one’s soul. Concerning the first, the scholarship has identified Socrates as the ‘premier questioner,’ able to tear apart any position (Hartman 2000). According to this line of thinking, Socrates’ major contributions to the history of ethical thinking has been the elenchus, the method whereby one poses critical questions aimed at identifying others’ unwarranted presuppositions, invalid arguments, and tacit contradictions (Hartman 2000, p. 214; Morrell 2004, p. 386). This method has given rise to pedagogical approaches, referred to as the ‘Socratic Method,
Data Loading...
