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Introduction: Morality in the Marketplace
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17178 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
1,207 Words |
| Author
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Jude P. Dougherty
Jude P. Dougherty is the dean of the Department of Philosophy
at the Catholic University of America. |
It is always difficult to talk about business or business ethics in the abstract because the terms cover a multiplicity of radically different enterprises. A major corporation is a world apart from the family-owned and -operated hardware store. A manufacturing firm is different from a financial organization. Wholesale, retail, and service operations differ from each other not only in size but in nature, and consequently in the type of problems they confront, including those that have a moral dimension.
Does it then make sense to talk about business ethics when the entities to which the term presumably applies vary so much in character? In fact, given the dissimilarity of contexts, we may ask if there is such a thing as ethics itself. No doubt most people would like to believe that there are ethical principles to which everyone, corporations included, are accountable. How those principles are to be determined and defended is recognized as one of the most pressing problems confronting the moral philosopher. Many answers have been given.
John Dewey, perhaps the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century, held that a science of ethics is possible. For Dewey, that which gives ethics its scientific character is not only its generality but its willingness to take into account reports from the behavioral and other sciences, especially when determining the project outcomes of alternative courses of action. Dewey experienced some difficulty in promoting a scientific ethics while insisting that all problems are to be solved within the context in which they arise without appealing to ontological structures or time-transcending norms. This is the dilemma faced by every instrumentalist or pragmatist: The temptation is to be pragmatic in the bad sense of choosing the expedient while ignoring the long-range requirement of human nature.
A contemporary thinker like Werner Marx attempts to avoid both a pragmatic and an ontological grounding of morality, suggesting that the ethical arises as a result of a freely elected set of principles. We simply choose to live by a set of standards affectively embraced. His proposed norms result from the adoption or appropriation of recognized values such as "love," "compassion," and "the recognition of others." Love, says Marx, includes its weaker forms such as "fraternity," "friendship," and "social solidarity." Though love is possible only in smaller groups, compassion can be present in larger societies. Those individuals who adopt love as a principle and those communities that are bound by compassion will recognize obligations. With the recognition of obligation comes a means for
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