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How Kantian a Theory of Kantian Capitalism?: A Response to Bowie’s Ruffin Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

Andrew C. Wicks
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Extract

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” (i.e., business ethics as “oxymoron”) or largely irrelevant to it (i.e., business ethics as vacuous). 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.

Type
Section II
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue S1: The Ruffin Series Special Issue No.1 , 1998 , pp. 61 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Business Ethics Quarterly 1998

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References

Endnotes

1 I wish to thank several people for their help in writing this paper, especially Edwin Hartman who carefully read and wrote extensive comments on the paper and provided invaluable insights for improving the paper. I am also grateful to Amy Wicks for her critical reading and comments on the paper. In addition, I benefitted greatly from discussions with Norm Bowie, Ed Freeman, Dan Gilbert, and Tom Jones at the Ruffin Lectures.

2 For other efforts of this sort see Freeman, R. E. “The Politics of Stakeholder Theory,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (1994): 409-22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilbert, D. R. Jr., The Twilight of Corporate Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Solomon, R., Ethics and Excellence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; P., Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modem Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Wicks, A. C., Gilbert, D. R. Jr., and Freeman, R.E., “A Feminist Reinterpretation of The Stakeholder Concept,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (1994): 475-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wicks, A. C., “Overcoming The Separation Thesis: The Need for a Reconsideration of SIM Research,” Unpublished paper currently being revised and resubmitted at Business and Society.

3 Ibid.

4 Several of these issues are related to an earlier paper I did on Bowie's work. See Wicks, A.C., “Norman Bowie and Richard Rorty on Multinationals: Does Business Ethics Need ‘Metaphysical Comfort?,” Journal of Business Ethics (March 1990): 191-200.

5 Robbin Derry and Ron Green make this observation based on their reading of leading texts within the field in their essay, “Method in Business Ethics: A Critical Assessment,” Journal of Business Ethics 8 (1989): 129-41. Their own assessment of what this means and what should be done is somewhat different from my own, but they do provide evidence that this phenomenon is occurring and that it is problematic.

6 Abbott, T. K. (trans.), Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and the Works on the Theory of Ethics, 6th edition, (London, 1909): 389Google Scholar (from The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).

7 Ibid., p. 389.

8 See Coppelston, F., “Kant: Morality and Religion,” The History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1960): 311Google Scholar.

9 Walzer, M., Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stout, J., Ethics After Babel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

10 Rawls, J., Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Solomon, Ethics and Excellence.

11 Rorty, R., “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. He argues that many of the critics of Rawls and liberal politics (e.g., MacIntyre, Sandel, Horkheimer and Adorno) try to link the foundations of Kant to his moral and political ideas, arguing that the latter rely on the intelligibility of the former. They then try to discredit Kant's metaphysics and argue that his moral and political ideas should be rejected on that basis. Rorty argues that this need not be the case, and that a different grounding can provide compelling reasons to accept the moral and political insights of Kant.

12 See especially Sandel, , A Liberalism and The Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar as well as Horkheimer, A., and Adorno, T., Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972)Google Scholar; MacIntyre, A., After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Rorty, R., “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”; Stout, J., Ethics After Babel', Walzer, M., Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

13 Rawls, Political Liberalism.

14 Freeman, “The Politics of Stakeholder Theory”.

15 Solomon, Ethics and Excellence.

16 Weick, K., The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979): p. 177.Google Scholar

17 Werhane, P., “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management,” see this volume.

18 Walzer, M., Interpretation and Social Criticism (New York: Basic Books, 1988).Google Scholar

19 Warren, V., “Feminist Directions in Medical Ethics,” Hypatia 4 (Summer 1989) : 74.

20 This theme pervades his book, but is most evident in the sections on black conservatives and affirmative action. See the passage where he says “Any progressive discussion about the future of racial equality must speak to black poverty and black identity.,” West, C., Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)Google Scholar:

21 Plato, The Republic. In Hamilton, E., and Cairns, H., (Ed’s.) The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).

22 Rorty, R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

23 Walzer, Thick and Thin. Walzer sees the term “thick” as referring to the more localized, finely nuanced moral concepts which are capable of “doing work” or helping us to evaluate specific practices. The thin, or universal notions, provide some basis for seeing interconnections across “thick” moralities, but as not capable of doing much constructive work in terms of analyzing practices or prescribing certain activities.

24 The IBM-Fujitsu Dispute (Harvard Business School Case # 9-390-168).