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Morality and Markets: A Response to Boatright

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

John Hendry
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Extract

In his Society for Business Ethics presidential address, “Does business ethics rest on a mistake?” John Boatright argues that we should move away from what he calls the Moral Manager Model of Business Ethics toward a Moral Market Model, in which the focus is not on the individual responsibilities of managers but on the regulation of economic markets to achieve ethical ends. Boatright’s message is a very important one. Market mechanisms and market values increasingly dominate our society, and it is important that business ethicists recognize this and ask how they can contribute to such a society. But this should not mean throwing out or even downplaying the Moral Manager Model. I shall argue here that economic markets are inherently hostile both to regulation and to moral values, and that their beneficence depends critically on the political context of traditional moral values and individual responsibility that the Moral Manager Model supports. Indeed, as we go through a period of commercial and cultural globalization, marked by a combination of rapid economic development and moral uncertainty, the need for moral managers has never been greater.

Boatright begins by identifying three problems with the Moral Manager Model of business ethics. First, to the extent that it describes the desired aims of business ethics, he contends that business ethics is fighting a losing battle. The most admired corporate executives today are not “moral managers” at all but hard-headed and ruthless economic actors. Secondly, its application is effectively restricted to the senior managers of large companies: it does not speak to the situation of the majority of managers and working people. Thirdly, he suggests, most people nowadays are primarily economic actors. In business and in our home lives we act and think as market participants, striving to get the best deal.

Type
Response Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , July 2001 , pp. 537 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2001

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References

Notes

1 J. R. Boatright, “Presidential address: does business ethics rest on a mistake?” Business Ethics Quarterly 9 (1999): 583-592.

2 M. Douglas, Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd edition (New York: Pelican Books, 1973 / Routledge, 1996).

3 See O. E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Anti-Trust Implications (New York: Free Press, 1975) and W. G. Ouchi, “Markets, bureaucracies and clans,” Administrative Science Quarterly 15 (1980): 129-141.

4 J. Hendry, “Cultural theory and contemporary management organization,” Human Relations 52 (1999): 557-577.

5 Pace Adam Smith, the division of labour is a feature of hierarchical, not market, societies: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 19 (Book. I Chap. II).

6 On the possibility of rebellion see J. K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1992).

7 See for example H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) and S. Deetz, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

8 E. Lévinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987) and “Ethics as first philosophy” in The Lévinas Reader, ed. S.Hands (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). These ideas have recently been applied to business ethics by my colleague John Roberts, “Corporate governance and the ethics of Narcissus,” Business Ethics Quarterly 11 (2001): 109-127.