Systems Thinking and Moral Imagination: Rethinking Business Ethics with Patricia Werhane

443 Pages·2019·5.933 MB·English

by  David J. Bevan, Regina W. Wolfe, Patricia H. Werhane

Eminent Voices in Business Ethics 48
David J. Bevan
Regina W. Wolfe
Patricia H. Werhane Editors
Systems Thinking
and Moral
Imagination
Rethinking Business Ethics
with Patricia Werhane
Issues in Business Ethics
Volume 48
Series Editors
Wim Dubbink, Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities,
Tilburg University, Netherlands
Mollie Painter-Morland, Nottingham Trent University Business School, UK
Consulting Editor
Patricia H. Werhane, Professor Emerita, Darden School University of Virginia,
USA; Professor Emerita, DePaul University, USA
Former Series Editors
Brian Harvey, Henk van Luijk†, Patricia Werhane
Editorial Board
Andreas Scherer, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Campbell Jones, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Daryl Koehn, Director, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics,
DePaul University, USA
Georges Enderle, University of Notre Dame, USA
Ghislain Deslandes, ESCP Europe, Paris, France
Horst Steinmann, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Hiro Umezu, Keio University, Japan
Joseph Desjardins, St. John’s University, Minnesota, USA
Lu Xiaohe, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, P.R. China
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Eminent Voices in Business Ethics
Series Editors
Wim Dubbink, Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities,
Tilburg University, Netherlands
Mollie Painter-Morland, Nottingham Trent University Business School, UK
The Issues in Business Ethics series aims to showcase the work of scholars who
critically assess the state of contemporary business ethics theory and practice by
means of rigorous philosophical analyses and/ or normative evaluation. The series
wants to be an outlet for authors who bring the wealth of philosophical literature to
bear on contemporary issues in the global business ethics realm. The series especially
welcomes work that addresses the interrelations between the agent, organization
and society, thus exploiting the differences and connections between the micro,
meso and macro levels of moral and political analysis. The series aims to establish
and further the conversation between scholars, experts and practitioners who do not
typically have the benefit of each others’ company and as such, it welcomes
contributions from various philosophical paradigms, and from a wide array of
scholars who are active within in the international business context. Its audience
includes scholars and practitioners, as well as senior students, and its subject matter
will be relevant to various sectors that have an interest and stake in international
business ethics. The scope of the series is therefore broad, but preference will be
given to studies that draw on a thorough literature review and other theoretical
methodologies, rather than empirical work. Authors from all continents are welcome
to submit proposals, though the series does seek to encourage a global discourse of
a critical and normative nature. The series insists on rigor from a scholarly
perspective, but authors are encouraged to write in a style accessible to a broader
audience and to seek out subject matter of practical relevance.
More information about this subseries at http://www.springer.com/series/11544
David J. Bevan • Regina W. Wolfe
Patricia H. Werhane
Editors
Systems Thinking and Moral
Imagination
Rethinking Business Ethics
with Patricia Werhane
Editors
David J. Bevan Regina W. Wolfe
University of Hong Kong Catholic Theological Union
Hong Kong, China Chicago, IL, USA
Patricia H. Werhane
Darden School University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA, USA
DePaul University
Chicago, IL, USA
In the original publication of Chapter 16, “Freedom, Commodification, and the Alienation of
Labor in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,” Philosophical Forum (1991) 22: 383–398,
footnotes 29 through 44 were not printed; they have been added to this volume. All Tables
and Figures have been renumbered to reference chapter numbers in this volume. In instances
where the original publication contained endnotes, these have been converted to footnotes.
This book consists of previously published material.
ISSN 0925-6733 ISSN 2215-1680 (electronic)
Issues in Business Ethics
ISBN 978-3-319-89796-7 ISBN 978-3-319-89797-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89797-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018944685
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
© Southern Journal of Philosophy 1987
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Preface
This book is dedicated to the presentation of and reflections on the work of Patricia
Werhane, who studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Wellesley College and
pursued her interests at Northwestern University where she completed her doctoral
work. Although Werhane is best known as one of the founders of contemporary
business ethics, she focused her doctorate on the writings of the later Wittgenstein,
and her dissertation is refracted and refined in the publication of “Skepticism, Rules
and Private Language” (Werhane, 1992). Subsequently, however, having been
requested to teach business ethics at Loyola University Chicago, she and Tom
Donaldson developed one of the first textbooks on that topic, Ethical Issues in
Business, now in its 8th edition. From that perspective, she initially focused on
employee rights in her first monograph, Person, Rights, and Corporations, from
which a chapter has been excerpted for this collection. Later Werhane developed the
idea of moral imagination as key to ethical decision-making in practice.
Werhane gives insights to the development of her notion of moral imagination
when she describes attending a 1994 conference on social psychology and business
ethics: “listening to these papers challenged my ingrained assumptions about the
application of ethical theory to business” (Werhane, 2007; p.ix). What confronts
Werhane in practice is that managerial ignorance of traditional ethics was not an
adequate explanation of the ethical failures in day-to-day business. By retracing
Mark Johnson’s (1993) work in cognitive science to clearly identifiable strands of
moral imagination in Adam Smith (1976 (1759)), Werhane – as we shall see later –
renovates the concept for contemporary applied ethics and business ethics.
Systems thinking was a further deviation from the traditional linear thinking that
characterized the early writings in business ethics including her own; by the mid
1990s, her work in applied ethics and business ethics breaks out. This new form of
analysis is also reflected in her writings on organizational issues in health care,
women in leadership, and her latest writings on business ethics. We include excerpts
from all these topics.
The main body of the book is presented in five sections. In the Introduction, we
trace Werhane’s positions in mainstream ethics and suggest aspects of her work that
point to her departure from the potentially restrictive prejudices of philosophers.
v
vi Preface
Part I follows the development of mental models and shows the way in which
Werhane’s critique of scientific linear models of business ethics yields a more holis-
tic, processual and systemic paradigm. In Part II, we discuss the development of
systems thinking and consider the scope of such an approach to the rethinking of
business ethics. Part III revisits Werhane’s careful and demanding readings of Adam
Smith’s ethics, including her explicit refutation of a purely selfish and, from her
perspective, inaccurate appropriation of Smith as a poster boy for the Chicago strain
of instrumental neoclassical economics. The final part is devoted to some of her
voluminous writings on business ethics for which she is best known. Together, these
narrative text-based interventions manifest the evolution of Werhane’s practice.
Referring to our title’s theme of rethinking business ethics, her more recent practice
has expanded to include film and television media. This later work is exemplified in
her Emmy Award winning series Big Questions.1 In these documentary films
Werhane confronts topics familiar from her work on issues of inequity in the com-
plex relationship between business and society and brings to our attention an array
of the immanent, if unintentional, consequences of globalization.
Hong Kong, China David J. Bevan
Chicago, IL, USA Regina W. Wolfe
Patricia H. Werhane
1 These can be viewed at www.bqnow.com
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to acknowledge Stephen Wolfe, for his assistance in locating
originals of articles, and Leon Hooper, SJ, director of the Woodstock Library at
Georgetown University, for the hospitality he provides to visiting scholars. We
would also like to acknowledge the endless helpful colleagues in the copyright
departments of an evident array of academic publishers. We would like to thank
anonymous readers organized by Springer for their comments on our editorial work.
In addition, we particularly want to acknowledge the enthusiastic support of Neil
Olivier, Executive Editor, and the patient forbearance and prompt, professional
editorial assistance of Diana Nijenhuijzen, both at Springer Social Sciences and
Humanities.
vii
Contents
Introduction
1 The Constitutive Nature of Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 The Normative/Descriptive Distinction in Methodologies
of Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3 A Theory of Moral Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4 The Compatibility of Freedom, Equality and a Communitarian
Notion of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Part I Mental Models and Moral Imagination
5 Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making
in Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
6 Moral Motivation Across Ethical Theories: What Can
We Learn for Designing Corporate Ethics Programs? . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
with Simone de Colle
7 The Role of Mental Models in Social Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
with Laura Pincus Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine E. Englehardt,
and Michael S. Pritchard
8 Globalization, Mental Models and Decentering Stakeholder
Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
9 Social Constructivism, Mental Models, and the Problems
of Obedience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
with Laura P. Hartman, Dennis Moberg, Elaine Englehardt,
Michael Pritchard, and Bidhan Parmar
ix
x Contents
10 Human Rights as Social Constructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
with Thomas E. Wren
Part II Systems Thinking
11 Mental Models, Moral Imagination and Systems Thinking
in the Age of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
12 Business Ethics, Organization Ethics, and Systems Ethics
for Health Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
13 Women Leaders in a Globalized World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
14 Building Partnerships to Create Social and Economic
Value at the Base of the Global Development Pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . 245
with Jerry M. Calton, Laura P. Hartman, and David Bevan
Part III A dam Smith’s Contribution to Business Ethics
15 The Role of Self-Interest in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . . . . . . 271
16 Freedom, Commodification, and the Alienation of Labor
in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
17 Business Ethics and the Origins of Contemporary Capitalism:
Economics and Ethics in the Work of Adam Smith
and Herbert Spencer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
18 The Inexorable Sociality of Commerce: The Individual
and Others in Adam Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
with David Bevan
Part IV B ig Questions in Business Ethics
19 The Rashomon Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
20 The Principle of Double Effect and Moral Risk: Some
Case-Studies of US Transnational Corporations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
21 Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making in the Perception
of Ethical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
with Laura P. Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine Englehardt, and
Michael S. Pritchard
22 The Moral Responsibility of Multinational Corporations
to Be Socially Responsible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
23 Trust After the Global Financial Meltdown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
with Laura Hartman, Crina Archer, David Bevan, and Kim Clark