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A Pragmatic Approach to Business Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Bill Shaw
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Type
Review Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 159 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1997

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References

1Stanley Fish, “Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin,” Pragmatism in Law and Society (1991). In his own view, Fish is the only one of this group that plays without a safety net. His pragmatic account of jurisprudence is without foundation. Posner’s doesn’t end that way; he offers a pragmatic program anchored in social science. Rorty’s program is one of “[L]oyalty to other human beings clinging together in the dark, not our hope of getting things right.” Dworkin is engaged in this essay by Fish not because of Dworkin’s pragmatism—in fact Dworkin rejects pragmatism because “there is nothing in it to accept.” Fish maintains that Dworkin would see things otherwise if he would come to accept Fish’s “enriched notion of practice.”Google Scholar
2Michalos is consistent throughout this volume in pinning “the moral point of view” to these principles. He views the principle of beneficence as more fundamental “[B]ecause moral goodness ought to require more of people than a life of anxious inactivity mixed with pious hopes for our common future.” (11, 95)Google Scholar
3Michalos, Alex C., Foundations of Decision-Making (1978). By way of further explanation, firms that are characterized as satisficers set goals, targets, or ranges for costs, production, sales, market share, profit and other important economic indicators rather than focusing on profit maximization as per the marginal cost/marginal revenue equation.Google Scholar
4It’s usually possible, of course, to reflect on previous decisions, and, with a little imaginative “reconbobulation,” come up with a benefit/cost justification for someting that was “the right thing to do.” That’s true up-front as well. Business people frequently decide to “do the right thing,” and then dress it up in benefit/cost language because that seems to go down better with their constituencies. What I’m contending for here is an expanded notion of “rationality,” one that honors the character, the integrity, and the virtue of the decision-maker without regard to the calculation of outcome ratios.Google Scholar
5For a further examination of self-interest at the extreme, see, Norman Bowie, “Challenging the Egoist Paradigm,” Business Ethics Quarterly (1992), and Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension (1990).Google Scholar
6Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., Civil War veteran and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, evidently had a more pessimistic version of this senario in mind when he wrote as follows: “I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force.” Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock of Feb. 1, 1920, in Holmes-Pollock Letters 36 (Mark DeWolfe Howe ed. 1961).Google Scholar
7Carr, Albert Z., “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” Harvard Business Review 40 (January-February 1968). Carr argued that business was analogous to a poker game with its own set of rules, and that it was possible, and appropriate, to play by these rules in one’s business endeavors without feeling the guilt that would attach if one’s personal ethics were invoked. It is Carr’s claim that this game can be played without undermining one’s personal ethics.Google Scholar
8I certainly do not mean to convey the idea that this is the only ethical problem in the workplace. Many problems require long and thoughtful probing before one can hope for a successful resolution.Google Scholar
9Hosmer, Larue Tone, “Why Be Moral?”, Business Ethics Quarterly (1994).Google Scholar
10In Chapter Four, The Loyal Agent’s Argument, Michalos identifies selfishness with egoism, as follows: “In conflict situations when there are not enough benefits to satisfy everyone, he will try to see that his own needs are satisfied, whatever happens to the needs of others. He is more interested in being first than in being nice, and he assumes that everyone else is too. He may harbor the suspicion that if everyone behaved as he does, the world’s resources would be used in a maximally efficient way and everyone would be materially better off. But these are secondary considerations at best. His first consideration, which he only regards as prudent or smart, is to look out for Numero Uno, himself.” (46–47) This is the view that Michalos seems to import into the “worst argument.” If this is an appropriate move, you can see how his concerns about this argument emerge from the premise.Google Scholar
11Posner, Richard A., The Problems of Jurisprudence 150 (1990).Google Scholar
12I have in mind here a level of thought that, insofar as current economic learning is concerned, is unassailable. For example: “Other things being equal, an oversupply of goods, rather than a convergence of the planets, will cause prices will fall.” Beyond this, most such learning is assailable.Google Scholar