Abstract

If you are a member of an organization, how should you be committed to its aims and values? I argue that relational equality requires organizational superiors – those endowed with higher authority within organizations – generally to make decisions on the basis of pertinent organizational aims and values, even when there are competing extra-organizational moral considerations. I start with cases of objectionable managerial moral activism, in which superiors take the moral law into their own hands, shirking organizational aims and values for the sake of extra-organizational moral considerations. Since these managerial decisions enforce moral norms on subordinates, and since the moral norms that superiors enforce do not correspond to reasonably expected organizational aims and values (at least those that are compatible with relational equality), the superiors thereby treat subordinates as moral inferiors. This implies that relational equality requires an important form of organizational partiality of organizational superiors.