Business Ethics Journal Review

Steinbauer et al. (2014) examine how ethical leadership leads to improved moral judgment, and the role of followers’ perceived accountability and self-leadership. In this Commentary, I offer two critiques. First, I argue that the relationship that Steinbauer et al. propose between ethical leadership and self-leadership contains internal contradictions. Second, I argue that ethical leadership can have undesirable consequences for moral judgment and that self-leadership requires substantial freedom from an external authority. Thus, my arguments focus on Steinbauer et al.’s understanding of self-leadership and moral judgment in relation to ethical leadership.

In his Commentary on my Principles Approach, Gregory Wolcott (2014) worries that the approach leaves no room for ethical theory and decries the tendency of business school faculty to derive ethical conclusions from legal standards. However, the Principles Approach is, by design, open to supplementation by ethical theory and has the virtue of providing a basis for making ethical assessments of legal standards.

John Hasnas (2013) argues for a “Principles Approach” to supplant normative theory and casuistry in business ethics pedagogy. This Commentary argues some normative theory ought still to have some place in business ethics education and that the problems Hasnas sees in business ethics pedagogy only tell half the story.

Matthew Sinnicks has attempted to cast doubt on my efforts to extend MacIntyre’s virtue ethics with regard to re-conceiving management as a domain-relative practice. However, rather than weakening my argument, his objections provide an opportunity to clarify a key distinction, address several misunderstandings, respond to criticisms, rectify misrepresentations, and show again that MacIntyre’s virtue ethics provides a fertile framework for re-casting issues of management and business ethics, including a transformed understanding of management as a domainrelative practice.

Dominic Martin attributes to me and other adherents of the market-failures approach to business ethics a narrow account of justification, focused solely on economic efficiency. On the contrary, I argue the appeal to efficiency and market failure is best seen as a pragmatic, Rawlsian, strategy to find common ground and a shared vocabulary for business ethicists who have long been Balkanized by overly ideological “theories.” So understood, the market-failures approach is not the reductivist program Martin portrays it to be. Efficiency and the taming of market failures should be seen as one of many grounds (albeit usually the most important) for both regulatory and beyond-compliance norms for business in a capitalist democracy.

Claus Dierksmeier admirably combats the misperception that Kant is a deontologist with no regard for virtue. Dierksmeier contends Kant offers a theory of virtue that can contribute in significant ways to advancing the analysis of, e.g., stakeholder theory and internal compliance programs. His plea that business ethicists should view Kant as a resource for thinking more widely and deeply about virtue seems eminently sensible. However, there are grounds for questioning whether a Kantian approach will be of much help in thinking through the ethics of real world business practices.

I attempt to cast doubt on Beabout’s attempt to build on MacIntyre’s ethical theory by accounting for management as a ‘domain-relative’ practice for three reasons: i) we can partially engage in practices, so if management can be accounted a practice there is no need to invoke domain-relativity; ii) management does not seem to be domain-relative in the same way that other examples of domain-relative practices might be; and iii) practical wisdom, which Beabout sees as key to management as a domain-relative practice, is adequately covered by MacIntyre’s account of politics.

My original paper (Cohen 2012) argued that business ethics education should focus on cultivating empathetic concern. This response clarifies terminology used in that paper and responds to criticisms presented by David Ohreen (2013).

This paper challenges Cohen’s application of empathy to business ethics education. I argue Cohen fails to adequately address the problems of empathetic penetrability and accuracy in regards to reading other’s minds. Given these problems, I conclude empathy may be less important as an antecedent to moral action than Cohen suggests.

Although Michael Porter’s and Marc Kramer’s article “Creating Shared Value” is a welcome attempt to mainstream business ethics among management practitioners, it is neither so radical nor such a departure from standard management thinking as the authors make it seem. Porter’s and Kramer’s criticism and rejection of corporate social responsibility depends upon a straw man conception of CSR and their ultimate reliance on economic arguments is too normatively thin to do the important work of reconnecting businesses with society. For these reasons, prospects for a genuine reinvention of capitalism lie elsewhere.

Why do companies pursue CSR? I concur with Christian Thauer that intraorganizational dynamics are important, but find his focus on managerial dilemmas unconvincing. I counter by suggesting that a renewed focus on managerial values can help explain CSR when external conditions are held constant.

Alexei Marcoux has argued that business ethics should focus less on organizational form and more on business practice. He suggests that a definition of ‘business’ as “a(n intentionally) self-sustaining, transactionseeking and transaction-executing practice” can help facilitate this shift by attuning researchers to the essential activity of business. I argue that this definition has troubling implications for a practice-based approach to business ethics, and that anyone advocating such an approach would be better served by treating ‘business’ as a cluster concept.

Singer thinks that my argument does not give adequate consideration to the role that markets play in Jensen’s work. The problem with this objection is that Singer considers only the perspective of those who transact with corporations, not the perspective of those who participate in them. I think that there is actually less distance between my view and Singer’s view than it may seem. In a sense, I share Singer’s “political view” of the corporation, but I conceive of the corporation as a legal institution, rather than an extension of the state or a concession provided by the state.

Although Hidalgo (2013) accurately identifies mine as a moralized account of dependence, he misconstrues the role it plays in my (2008) argument. A specified duty of beneficence is not based on the dependency of one person on another, but on the idea that our relationships with others provide the opportunity to disregard specific others’ basic needs. Hidalgo (2013: 74) thus misattributes to me the view that “relationships of dependence activate special obligations.” Only by conflating my argument for a specified duty of beneficence with my use of dependency to limit and clarify the extent of these demands, does my argument appear circular.

This brief paper engages with Hussain’s critique of what he refers to as the “efficiency argument for profit maximization.” Here I argue that Hussain’s strategy of seeing the corporation as an extension of the private sphere is not a very effective way of challenging the profit-maximization norm.

Jeremy Snyder argues that employers have obligations to pay their workers a living wage if workers stand in relationships of dependence with their employers. I argue that Snyder’s argument for this conclusion faces a dilemma. Snyder can adopt either a descriptive or a moralized account of dependence. If Snyder adopts a descriptive account, then it is false that dependence activates obligations to pay a living wage. If Snyder endorses a moralized account of dependence, then Snyder’s argument is circular. So, Snyder’s argument fails to establish that employers have obligations to pay their workers a living wage.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) engage in various political activities, can have significant political impacts, and can be designed with different political concerns in mind. In arguing that there is much theorizing to do in these regards, I recently outlined a critical research agenda for what I term the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (or political CSR for short). Whilst Néron acknowledges that the agenda I set out is important and valuable, he also suggests that the label I use – i.e., political CSR – is too constraining. I here make a number of clarifications that explain why this is not the case.

This brief response to Smith focuses on his distinction between moral and political responsibility in general and how it relates to human rights in particular. I argue that the notion of political responsibility as it is used in the debate on political CSR often does not exclude morality but is based on it.

Peter Jaworski objects to my “market failures” approach to business ethics on the grounds that in some cases I have mislabeled as “market failure” what are in fact instances of "government failure." While acknowledging that my overall approach might better be referred to as “Paretian,” I resist Jaworski's specific criticism. I argue that the term government failure should not be used to describe market transactions that are made less efficient through government intervention, but should be reserved for cases in which the market mechanism has been suspended and the transaction is occurring, inefficiently, through the organizational power of the state.

When states deregulate the price of payday loans, most consumers will pay more for emergency cash than when a moderate usury cap is imposed. But advocates of price deregulation, including Matt Zwolinski, fail to discuss the distributive effects of their favored policy or to explain why most borrowers should pay more than is necessary for a cash advance. The objections Zwolinski raises against my argument for imposing a usury ceiling in this market miss the mark because they do not justify the increased cost consumers must bear when the price of a payday loan is allowed to float.