Whither Business Ethics?

Two caveats before I gaze into the future of academic debates on ethics and the economy. First, I will focus on a particular subset of issues in the ethics-economy nexus: the one badly served by the rubric “business ethics”. This label is misleading because for almost anyone — lay people, philosophers, management scholars — it focuses attention immediately on the virtues, vices, and dilemmas of individual business people. The field I will be discussing here does indeed address those “micro-level” ethical concerns. But the best work in this interdisciplinary domain will not tackle these issues without engaging in “midlevel” theorizing about the institutions central to contemporary commerce: corporations and other kinds of businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professional associations, state regulatory agencies, and the like. And, of course, we would expect that the very best analysis of issues at these two levels will also be informed by “macro-level” theorizing on political economy and theories of justice and democracy to evaluate the market systems and political systems within which those midlevel institutions need to be justified. Roughly speaking, in a “well-enough-ordered” society, a business person’s conduct should be guided in large part by the rules and norms of the organizations they work for and deal with; where the rules of those organizations are structured or constrained by the design and regulation of markets (including rules about influencing the rule-makers); and where those designs of markets and political and regulatory processes are, in turn, sanctioned by a reasonably just constitutional order. “Business ethics” is concerned with how norms, rules and regulations at all these levels (extending internationally as well) are justified; but also with “beyond-compliance” norms that demand either violating existing rules or acting in ways that go “above and beyond” what they require. As I have written elsewhere, given this agenda of issues, the term “business ethics” is probably as inappropriate for this field as the term “political ethics” would be for the whole field of political philosophy. Yet like political ethics (say, of the sort we find in two recent works on democratic politics, Rosenblum 2008 and Gutmann & Thompson 2012) — and unlike much of normative political economy — business ethics is tethered to the institutions, norms, and feasible options for action or reform in our world. It can and must draw upon abstract justificatory principles, but it does so with an aim of justifying or criticizing the status quo and proposing plausible ways of improving it. I will suggest that business ethics, as a field, is passing into a crisis phase. And part of the explanation for this crisis is that theorizing at any of the three levels mentioned tends not to be well connected to theorizing at the other two levels. The second introductory caveat is that attempting to make confident predictions of the sort sought by the editors is obviously a mug’s game. Prognostications offered up by philosophers, typically at the turn of a decade, are not much more reliable than those peddled by storefront fortunetellers; and subject to many of the same cognitive biases. The agendas of our fields are highly influenced by big external events, movements, and demographic shifts (think of the impact on political philosophy by the mass expansion of the university system in North America and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, by the rise of feminism in the 1980s, or multiculturalism in the 1990s; or by the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11), as well as by the whims of taste and trendiness within our professional groups. That said, periodic academic crystal-ball-gazing remains a worthy …