In this article we revisit the notion of stakeholder responsibility as a way to highlight the role that stakeholders have in creating anethical business context. We argue for modifying the prevailing focus on corporate responsibility to stakeholders, and giving more serious attention to the importance of stakeholder responsibility—to firms, and to other stakeholders who are part of the collective enterprise. We elaborate why stakeholder responsibility matters, and suggest how making stakeholder responsibility a central focus of academics and practitioners can redefine (...) the interaction between firms and stakeholders and ultimately enhance business excellence. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished history of ethical thought in both business and medicine dating back to ancient times. Yet, the emergence of distinct academic disciplines ("business ethics" and "bioethics") which are also tied to broader social movements is a very recent phenomenon. In spite of the apparent affinities that would seem to emerge from this connection, many have argued that the differences between business and medicine make any constructive interaction between business ethics and bioethics minimal. Indeed, little has (...) been done to specifically examine the potential for collaboration and interdisciplinary research. This paper argues that there is considerable potential for constructive interaction between these two movements based on three major arguments: that the differences between medicine and business have been exaggerated, that both the fields face a number of urgent problems that are common to each, and that the model of bioethics can serve as a useful guide for business ethicists. (shrink)

Some accounts of moral responsibility hold that an agent's responsibility is completely determined by some aspect of the agent's mental life at the time of action. For example, some hold that an agent is responsible if and only if there is an appropriate mesh among the agent's particular psychological elements. It is often objected that the particular features of the agent's mental life to which these theorists appeal (such as a particular structure or mesh) are not necessary for responsibility. This (...) is because there appear to be cases in which an agent acts at an earlier time which causes her to lack the appropriate psychological features at some later time and yet, intuitively, she is responsible at that later .. (shrink)

We conduct an experiment with 459 nonprofessional investors to examine whether they evaluate companies differently based on management’s stated purpose for undertaking corporate social responsibility activities in the presence versus absence of a company-specific negative event. Specifically, we vary whether or not management intends to achieve financial returns from CSR activities in addition to promoting social good. We address investors’ decision processes by investigating whether their judgments are mediated by perceptions of future cash flows and/or the underlying ethical culture of (...) the company. Results show that absent a negative event, investment judgments are stronger when CSR activities are intended to achieve financial returns, through expectations of higher future cash flows. However, when a negative event occurs, we find a moderating effect of independent assurance of CSR disclosures. When disclosures are not assured, investors prefer CSR undertaken only for societal benefit, mediated by perceptions of a stronger ethical culture. However, when disclosures are assured, ethical culture is viewed similarly regardless of management’s intention to achieve financial returns from CSR activities. This suggests that management’s willingness to obtain independent assurance on disclosures is viewed as a positive ethical signal. Thus, assurance complements disclosure of CSR activities by contributing to protection against the impact of negative events. (shrink)

Michael Walzer is one of the most distinguished political philosophers and social critics of this century. His ideas have had great import and influence in political philosophy and political discussion, yet very few of his ideas have been incorporated explicitly into the business ethics literature. We argue that Walzer’s work provides an important conceptual canvas for business ethics scholars that has not been adequately explored. Scholars in business ethics often borrow from political theory and philosophy to generate new insights and (...) develop new substantive contributions. Many valuable theoretical resources are already used extensively—particularly Aristotle, Kant, Marx and a variety of utilitarian philosophers. Walzer offers another set of resources to bring to the conversation of what business ethics is and how business ethicists add value. This paper provides an opportunity to delve further into Walzer’s writings, particularly themes that are tied to business ethics, and to illustrate how his ideas can be extended to reshape our understanding of the field and develop new perspectives on ethical issues in commerce. (shrink)

Several critics have maintained that there are some critical differences between the ethics of medicine and the ethics of business such that health care should remain as free as possible from the influence of business. In particular, it has been suggested that the core moral identity of those in medical practice, and their accompanying institutions, are not only antagonistic, but effectively opposed to their counterparts in business. This paper attempts to challenge such a sharp contrast and suggests that a reformulation, (...) where the two are seen as fundamentally similar is both appropriate and compelling. Indeed, as we contemplate the direction of proposed comprehensive reforms in health care, such an understanding of the moral framework of medicine and business is essential. (shrink)

Intersectional feminist scholars emphasize how overlapping systems of oppression structure gender inequality, but in focusing on the gendered, classed, and racialized bases of stratification, many often overlook disability as an important social category in determining economic outcomes. This is a significant omission given that disability severely limits opportunities and contributes to cumulative disadvantage. We draw from feminist disability and intersectional theories to account for how disability intersects with gender, race, and education to produce economic insecurity. The findings from our analyses (...) of 2015 American Community Survey data provide strong empirical support for hierarchies of disadvantage, where women and racial minority groups with disabilities and less education experience the highest poverty levels, report the lowest total income, and have a greater reliance on sources outside the labor market for economic security. By taking disability into account, our study demonstrates how these multiple characteristics lead to overlapping oppressions that become embedded and reproduced within the larger social structure. (shrink)

Abstract:Total Quality Management (TQM) has been the object of extensive discussion within the popular literature and is increasingly of interest among management scholars. Recent scholarship has focused on the theoretical foundations of TQM, particularly what makes it work, why so many firms have had problems implementing it, and under what circumstances it may create a sustainable advantage for individual firms. This paper extends the work in theory development regarding TQM and offers an empirically testable theoretical model of its function. The (...) central claim of the paper is that embedded within TQM there are a set of moral values (“value dynamics”) that must be developed and maintained if it is to work, and that seeing them as moral values has significant theoretical and practical implications. That is, how TQM is understood and “enacted” (Weick 1979) by managers plays a significant role in determining its success. The discussion is linked to the ethics literature, normative implications of the model are explored, and directions for future research are outlined. (shrink)

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the (...) common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper utilizes a qualitative case study of the health care industry and a recent legal case to demonstrate that stakeholder theory’s focus on ethics, without recognition of the effects of incentives, severely limits the theory’s ability to provide managerial direction and explain managerial behavior. While ethics provide a basis for stakeholder prioritization, incentives influence whether managerial action is consistent with that prioritization. Our health care examples highlight this and other limitations of stakeholder theory and demonstrate the explanatory and directive (...) power added by the inclusion of the interactive effects of ethics and incentives in stakeholder ordering. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dimensions of Agency in Lincoln’s Second InauguralAndrew C. HansenSix days before he delivered his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln strode into his White House office. Greeting him were G. B. Lincoln, John A. Bingham, and Francis Carpenter, the last of whom had been living with Lincoln in the White House for six months, painting a portrait of the president reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet. It is Carpenter's (...) delineation of the president's entrance that contains the "only known description of the preliminaries of the Second Inaugural" (Barondess 1954, 62). "Mr. Lincoln came in through the side passage which had lately been constructed," Carpenter writes, "holding in his hand a roll of manuscripts." Lincoln turned to his guests and quipped, "Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect; it is what will be called my 'second inaugural' " (quoted in Barondess, 62).The content and modesty of Carpenter's description of the "preliminaries of the Second Inaugural" give the rhetorical critic a telling preview of what might be discovered in a reading of Lincoln's composition of that manuscript. The understatement in the length and simplicity of the address subtly and poignantly charms the reader. And there is "lots of wisdom" in the Second Inaugural: along with the Gettysburg Address, it contains the words of Lincoln that most abide. In a letter to an admiring Thurow Weed, who had penned Lincoln that his inaugural was "the neatest but the most pregnant and effective use to which the English Language was ever put," Lincoln wrote that he "expected" the Second Inaugural to "wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have ever produced" (quoted in Barondess 1954, 78).Underscoring Lincoln's perspicacity when he wrote to Weed that he "expected" the speech to "wear well," Carl Schulz's designation of the address as a "sacred poem" and the frequency with which that epithet is quoted by other critics confirm Lincoln's assessment of the oratorical endurance [End Page 223] of the piece. The estimation of the rhetorical durability of the address is perhaps best proven by its ability to withstand the polemics of its detractors, both immediately after its delivery and in successive generations, and the encomia of its admirers, both the obscure journalists and the renowned poets.1 Lately, only praise surrounds the Second Inaugural. Ronald C. White's thorough overview of the Second Inaugural's basic stylistic characteristics and how the oration resonates within Lincoln's social, political, and intellectual context is modestly entitled Lincoln's Greatest Speech (2002). In the last line of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Wills concludes that the Second Inaugural "is the only speech worthy to stand with" the Gettysburg Address (1992, 189) and later argues in the Atlantic Monthly that Lincoln "was at the peak of his creativity when he wrote the Second Inaugural Address" (1999, 70). The Second Inaugural seemingly speaks beyond its content and situation.Contained within the aura of adoration that surrounds the Second Inaugural is a significant charge to the rhetorical critic: what is it particularly about the address that sustains its agency and permits it to escape the evanescence accorded to most rhetorical efforts? When the agency of discourse helps to eliminate or extenuate the immediate exigency that calls forth that speech, it usually becomes remanded to the annals of history and is examined by the public or by scholars only when that historical nidus forces itself back upon the public's or the scholar's attention. The speech is exhausted by its situation and swallowed by its surrounding and future events. There are, however, those speeches like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural that practice their persuasion on audiences beyond the immediate exigency. They persist, they talk to us still, and their agency endures. Why is this true of Lincoln's Second Inaugural? This is the question that motivates my close reading of Lincoln's speech; and, as I hope to demonstrate, it is only through a close reading that such a question even makes sense. After explicating the scholarship that the Second Inaugural has generated and the critical assumptions that drive my close textual analysis, the essay will proceed with the work... (shrink)

In his presentation at the 1993 Society of Business Ethics conference, Ed Freeman offered a provocative explanation for why the normative core of business and society (B&S) research is perceived as fundamentally at odds with the pervasive wisdom on business and the academic literature on management (e.g., "business ethics is an oxymoron"). He termed this explanation the separation thesis. This article explores the possibility that the separation thesis captures a pervasively held view about corporations, even among B &S researchers. To (...) support this claim, the author looks at whether three value dichotomies, which provide the conceptual underpinnings of the separation thesis, are prevalent in the literature. The article provides evidence from the literatures in ethics, corporate social responsibility/ performance, and wider management issues to support its claims, and then looks at alternative possibilities for developing inquiry to avoid the pitfalls of these value dichotomies and, therefore, the separation thesis. (shrink)

The essays in this volume are illustrative of the variety of issues that arise when thinking about moral responsibility. From metaphysical concerns about free will and determinism to normative interest in the nature of our social practices, the philosophy of moral responsibility seems to have something to offer philosophers of nearly any taste or temperament. It is, in part, this pervasive and diverse significance that sparked and has sustained my own interest in the topic. I hope the essays in this (...) volume have similar effects on readers.The volume begins with an essay by Justin Capes, examining blameworthiness in the context of tragic choices. It is natural to think that freely and knowingly doing wrong, despite the awareness that one could do right, is a sufficient condition of blameworthiness. But some have recently argued that there are counterexamples to this claim. Suppose that Ann is faced with the difficult choice of saving a few strangers from certain death or preventing her c .. (shrink)

In his Ruffin Lecture, Bowie attempts to offer a Kantian theory of capitalism, and this strikes me as a constructive and important thing to do. Bowie’s proposal contributes to a new direction in research that I believe is critical: offering alternative interpretations of capitalism, specifically, theories based in moral concepts which are designed to make room for normative inquiry. In contrast, much of the work in business ethics has focused on the application of moral principles or ideas to specific problems (...) in business. These efforts work largely within the accepted meanings of “business” offered by economists, strategists and others, and then try to import moral concepts to identify and analyze various ethical problems. Several recent works in ethics suggest that this approach hasn’t addressed underlying assumptions about ethics and business which tend to make “ethical” approaches either directly conflicting with the logic of “business” or largely irrelevant to it. As such, the “problems” approach to doing ethics doesn’t address the substantial difficulties created by the conceptual terrain to which it was applied. Without more comprehensive and systematic attention to how researchers understand the conceptual underpinnings of capitalism, the contributions of such efforts will be limited and tenuous—that is, they will make projects which attempt to “apply” ethics onto business seem naive or implausible to people outside the community of business ethicists. (shrink)

Abstract:Recent work on the subject speaks to the importance trust has for firm performance (e.g., Hagen and Choe, 1999; Hill, 1995). Yet little work has been done to show how context affects the ability of firms to create trust in relationships with key stakeholders. This paper looks at how the institutional environment may affect the performance of different strategies for managing firm-stakeholder relationships, and in turn, how this affects firm performance. The authors put forward propositions that build on these theoretical (...) insights and offer prospects for future empirical work. (shrink)

Although separated by the centuries, Anselm and Hegel represent two different developments of the ontological proof. This book guides the reader through an exploration of the perplexing ontological argument from a well-balanced analysis of the works of two significant, yet polar opposite thinkers, Anselm and Hegel.

Manipulation arguments are commonly deployed to raise problems for compatibilist theories of responsibility. These arguments proceed by asking us to reflect on an agent who has been manipulated to perform some (typically bad) action but who still meets the compatibilist conditions of responsibility. The incompatibilist argues that it is intuitive that the agent in such a case is not responsible even though she met the compatibilist conditions. Thus, it is argued, the compatibilist has not provided conditions sufficient for responsibility. Patrick (...) Todd has recently argued that incompatibilists have taken on a heavier dialectical burden than is necessary. Todd argues that incompatibilists need not argue that an agent in a manipulation case is not at all responsible, but only that her responsibility is mitigated in order to refute compatibilism. Hannah Tierney has responded to Todd’s argument by arguing that a compatibilist can admit that manipulation mitigates responsibility without eliminating it. I argue that Tierney’s response is unsuccessful on its own terms. But, I argue, Todd’s argument can be resisted by way of a parallel counter-argument for compatibilism. I argue that Todd’s argument for incompatibilism is no more powerful than my argument for compatibilism. And since Todd’s manipulation argument is offered as an objection to compatibilism, this amounts to a victory for the compatibilist; the objection is defused. (shrink)

Anosognosia for hemiplegia is the denial of neurologically-caused paralysis, and it often co-occurs with a number of distortions of belief and emotion such as somatoparaphrenia and an exaggeration of negative affect towards minor health complaints. The salience of these latter symptoms led early investigators to propose explanations of AHP which construed it as a process of motivated self-deception against the overwhelming anxiety and depression that knowledge of deficit would otherwise cause, and which was observed in hemiplegic patients without the anosognosia. (...) Since some influential critiques of this approach, however, theories of this kind have largely been rejected on the grounds that they are inappropriately “psychogenic.” What has replaced them are a class of theories which explain the lack of awareness in terms of neurocognitive deficit, with the deficit in question variously described by researchers as involving spatial awareness, motor control, and other capacities. In this paper I argue – contra claims in the literature – that the patterns of explanation which are characteristic of the psychodynamic theory are not incompatible in principle with the notion that the illness involves neurocognitive deficit. That means that these patterns of explanation can be preserved where they make good sense of the obscure attitudinal and emotional symptoms that occur in AHP – symptoms that are otherwise difficult to explain. I suggest some ways in which this fact could be accommodated by deficit theories of the illness which are based on motor deficit. (shrink)

Many theorists have found the notion of forgiveness to be paradoxical, for it is thought that only the blameworthy can be appropriately forgiven but that the blameworthy are appropriately blamed not forgiven. Some have appealed to the notion of repentance to resolve this tension. But others have objected that such a response is explanatorily inadequate in the sense that it merely stipulates and names a solution leaving the transformative power of repentance unexplained. Worse still, others have objected that such a (...) response cannot succeed because no amount of repentance can render the blameworthy not blameworthy. I argue that this latter objection is based on a mistaken assumption, the acknowledgement of which has the power to resolve the paradox in a way that meets the explanatory adequacy challenge, and, more generally, has significant implications with which any full theory of forgiveness must engage. (shrink)

Sports, team games, and physical skill competitions appear to be a human universal and may have been prevalent throughout the hominin lineage. These activities are cognitively complex and can be associated with a distinctive and symbolic material culture. Yet, many of the artifacts used by foraging groups for sports, team games, and athletic competitions often have a low preservation probability.

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...) because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)

Many of those working on moral responsibility assume that "once blameworthy, always blameworthy." They believe that blameworthiness is like diamonds: it is forever. We argue that blameworthiness is not forever; rather, it can diminish through time. We begin by showing that the view that blameworthiness is forever is best understood as the claim that personal identity is sufficient for diachronic blameworthiness. We argue that this view should be rejected because it entails that blameworthiness for past action is completely divorced from (...) the distinctive psychological features of the person at the later time. This is because on none of the leading accounts of personal identity does identity require the preservation of any distinctive psychological features, but merely requires some form of continuity. The claim that blameworthiness is forever should therefore be rejected. We then sketch an account of blameworthiness over time, and consider two objections. (shrink)

Abstract:The term stakeholder is a powerful one. This is due, to a significant degree, to its conceptual breadth. The term means different things to different people and hence evokes praise or scorn from a wide variety of scholars and practitioners. Such breadth of interpretation, though one of stakeholder theory’s greatest strengths, is also one of its most prominent theoretical liabilities. The goal of the current paper is like that of a controlled burn that clears away some of the underbrush of (...) misinterpretation in the hope of denying easy fuel to the critical conflagration that would raze the theory. We aim to narrow its technical meaning for greater facility of use in management and organizational studies. By elaborating a number of common misinterpretations – critical and friendly – of the theory, we hope to render a stronger and more convincing theory as a starting place for future research. (shrink)

It is commonly held that agents can be blameworthy only for acts that are morally wrong. But the claim, when combined with a plausible assumption about wrongness, leads to an implausible view about blameworthiness. The claim should be rejected. Agents can be blameworthy for acts that are not morally wrong. We will take up the claim in terms of three initially appealing, but jointly inconsistent propositions. The significance of noting the inconsistency is motivated by a consideration of a number of (...) theorists who have held, or at least flirted with, all three propositions. The best way to resolve the inconsistency is to reject the claim that blameworthiness requires wrongness. There are good reasons to conclude that a different relation between blameworthiness and wrongness can garner more intuitive support than the alternatives. (shrink)

Using the lenses of both biblical and process theology, this essay explores the ways in which sacrament and church are inextricably bound with one another. By paying special attention to the seriousness with which Whiteheadian thought takes events in space and time, the essay develops a sacramentally focused ecclesiology that is radically embodied in the realm of occasions.

This paper distinguishes between synchronic responsibility (SR) and diachronic responsibility (DR). SR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at the time of the action, while DR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at some later time. While most theorists implicitly assume that DR is a straightforward matter of personal identity, I argue instead that it is grounded in psychological connectedness. I discuss the implications this distinction has for the concepts of apology, forgiveness, and punishment as well as the (...) way in which this distinction can be used to defend quality of will accounts of responsibility against objections involving psychological manipulation. I argue that the intuition that a manipulated agent is not responsible can be explained by appeal to the conditions of DR and, as such, does not unproblematically shed light on the conditions of SR. (shrink)

The problem of moral luck arises due to a particular tension in our thought. On the one hand, we seem readily inclined to endorse the principle that moral responsibility, that is, one’s praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors over which one lacks control. But, when we examine our actual practices, we find that our moral judgments are highly sensitive to luck. This resulting tension between principle and practice is the problem of moral luck, and (...) an attempt to solve this problem is an attempt to resolve this tension. The article first explains the traditional characterization of the problem and reviews three general strategies in responding to it. It is then argued that we should characterize the problem in a slightly broader way. This refocusing turns out to have significant methodological implications. (shrink)

A common feature of much recent work done in a variety of disciplines is the foregrounding of embodiment. Thinking in terms of a situated body however, brings up a complex problem which has often been overlooked: the re-importation of a kind of metaphysics of the body or a covert idealism, which stubbornly persists in many such discussions. This is seen in treatments ofthe body as a mediation or as a site for inscription of socio-cultural codings. We will briefly show how (...) even such an influential account ofritualization practices, that of Catherine Bell, shows traces of these problems. The corrective strategy to such conceptions is a properly situational ontology as suggested by Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy and Tim Ingolds critical work on environments. (shrink)