How does a role—whether in business, law, government, or some other institution—change what is morally permissible or obligatory? Here I present three options and argue for the third. On the balancing model, a role simply gives its occupant additional normative reasons, to be weighed against all other normative reasons. On the shielding model, a role comes with its own moral code, blocking the force of all role-external reasons. On the filtering model, a role selectively filters its occupant’s reasons for action, creating obligations or permissions to act on a narrowed range of considerations. I argue that the filtering model offers a superior analysis of the ethics of roles, including the concepts of professional integrity and discretion. I focus on three difficult cases: a nuclear safety regulator, a criminal defense lawyer, and a corporate lobbyist. I conclude by discussing the implications of the filtering model for business ethics.

Employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is an important determinant of organizational effectiveness; hence, scholars and practitioners are particularly interested in the factors, mechanisms, and conditions that promote such behaviors. Guided by the ability–motivation–opportunity framework, we draw on the social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to conceptualize a model that delineates the role of ethics-oriented human resource management (HRM) systems in promoting OCBs through the mediating role of employees’ moral attentiveness. We also refer to the job demands–resources theory to describe the moderating role of work-family balance in the indirect relationship between HRM systems and OCBs. The findings of an experiment involving 157 working adults (Study 1) and a three-wave field survey of 328 employees (Study 2) converge to support the hypothesized direct and indirect (via moral attentiveness) relationships between ethics-oriented HRM systems and OCBs as well as the first-stage moderating role of work-family balance.

Research on the legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) continues to thrive, however, the vague distinction between descriptive and normative legitimacy seems to cause growing confusion. In our paper, we identify three problems in the literature on MSI legitimacy: lack of precision regarding which of the two forms is used; blurring of boundaries between them; and ambiguity of assessment when assessing MSI legitimacy with the help of fine-grained criteria. These three problems, we argue, are not only detrimental to construct clarity but they can also lead to an erosion of normativity, by which we mean the increasing lack of normative grounding or (unintentional) deconstruction of the normative elements of legitimacy. We introduce a framework that addresses these three problems, ultimately demonstrating how scholars can use the concept of MSI legitimacy in a manner that enhances construct clarity and avoids erosion of normativity.

Studies of non-standard, project-based forms of work prevalent in the creative industries have typically theorized the relational dynamics of work as a competitive process of social capital accumulation involving an individualistic, self-enterprising, zero-sum, and winner-takes-all struggle for favourable social network-positioning. Problematizing this prevailing conceptualization, our empirical case study draws on fifty in-depth interviews and two focus groups with creative workers in Ghana to show how relations of mutual aid, including elaborate efforts to live harmoniously with others, are intricately intertwined with economic practices of getting by and getting ahead. Our analysis abductively mobilizes insights from Afro-communitarian ethics to theorize the mutual aid we observed as a complex socio-economic practice of relational resource redistribution contingent on degrees of social proximity. In applying “a theory from the South” to foreground the role of moral obligations, social harmony, and hands-on practices of mutual aid in non-standard forms of work, we contribute a “decolonial critique” of relationality of relevance to scholars of creative work and business ethicists.

There is an ongoing debate over the moral limits of the market. Many participants endorse the plausible idea that a market’s moral status depends, at least in part, on its consequences. For example, Satz holds that markets whose operation undermines citizens’ ability to interact as equals are bad. And Brennan and Jaworski maintain that markets trading in any good or service permissibly possessed may be arranged to operate without bad consequences. This plausible normative claim about markets depends on a descriptive one. Namely, that individual markets have descriptive properties which would provide a suitable basis for their consequentialist evaluation. This descriptive claim, I argue, is false. Markets’ consequences are a joint production. There is no principled means by which the consequences of one may be distinguished from those of another. Thus, the plausible idea is false. A market’s moral status cannot depend on its consequences.

When considering the implications of the shareholder-stakeholder debate in defining the purpose of a company, epistemological clarity is vital in this emerging theory of the firm. Such clarity can prevent recurrence based solely on rephrasing key terms. To understand how various stakeholders develop and interpret a shared purpose, I argue for the necessity of a pragmatist approach that is normative and process-oriented. Mental models play a crucial role in interpretive processes that define decision-making, where individual perspectives converge. The figures of Milton Friedman and Ed Freeman serve as “beacons,” as artefacts, in the transmission of knowledge through which we, as individuals, shape a shared understanding. In current societies, profound polarization obstructs solutions to grand challenges. Pragmatism starts by questioning the underlying values of everyone involved. It assumes that sound deliberative processes are the only way to reach real solutions—not only for the mind but, above all, for the heart.

From where does management acquire its authority to act in the name of the corporation? The orthodoxy that shareholders alone authorise management is frequently criticised for treating the corporation as the property of shareholders, rather than as a distinct legal person in its own right (Ciepley, 2013; Deakin, 2012; Robé, 2011; Stout, 2012). However, Hobbes’s theory of incorporation in Leviathan shows this influential critique of shareholder primacy to rest on a non sequitur. It does not follow from the (correct) observation that the corporation is a legal person to the conclusion that its interests are distinct from those of shareholders. Just as individuals become citizens of a state when they authorise a sovereign, shareholders are incorporated when they authorise a representative assembly to act in their interests. Shareholders thereby form a single corporate person and are ultimately responsible for whatever is done in their corporate name.

Some observers of the data economy have proposed that we treat data as labor. But are data contributions labor? Our folk conception of work emphasizes its importance and effort, such that work has a special interpersonal priority and deserves appreciation and compensation. The folk conception does not generally favor counting data as work, and so it serves as an error theory for reluctance to regulate data as labor. In contrast, labor regulation and policy focus on the political economy of labor, and in particular the bargaining dynamics that participants in a labor market face. Labor regulation aims to protect workers against the threats characteristically posed by such bargaining dynamics. Data-transferring interactions between internet platforms and users share similar bargaining dynamics, and so there is a promising functional similarity between labor regulation and proposals for data regulation that would facilitate data strikes and data unions.

Despite crowdfunding platforms’ growing involvement in financing welfare, related ethical issues have received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we focus on GoFundMe, the leading welfare crowdfunding platform in the US, to examine whether it facilitates the establishment of a just society that democratizes access to funding. Informed by Rawls’s ethics, we conduct a comprehensive analysis, arguing that GoFundMe’s modus operandi merits criticism. We advance three interrelated arguments for why GoFundMe is morally problematic. First, it distributes information and primary goods unfairly, perpetuating inequalities that disadvantage the most vulnerable. Second, it uses narratives that may distract public attention from systemic flaws in welfare provision, potentially reducing social pressure for institutional reform. Third, its emphasis on individual choice and responsibility may contribute to momentum for neoliberal policymaking. We show why scholars, policymakers, and platforms should engage in debate about regulating welfare crowdfunding activities to improve their ethicality.

In an era when the public and shareholders increasingly demand greater accountability from institutions for racial injustice and slavery, scholarship on corporate reparations is more and more essential. This article argues that corporations have played a significant role in the cultural dehumanization of Blackness and therefore have a particular responsibility to make repair. Cultural dehumanization refers to embedding anti-Blackness into US culture in service of capitalist profit accumulation, which has resulted in status and material inequalities between Blacks and whites that have persisted from slavery to the present. More specifically, the article argues corporations have a moral duty to offer reparations to Black Americans regardless of any redress offered by other perpetrators of anti-Blackness. It appeals to tort law in providing a moral justification for corporate reparations to Black Americans.

This article explores the moral permissibility of sweatshop boycotts. We build explicitly on Tomhave and Vopat’s (2018) framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of boycotts in general for the specific case of sweatshop labor. We argue that sweatshop boycotts are more likely to be morally justified when targeting forced labor compared to free labor and we explore the relevant moral tradeoffs associated with boycotts of free labor sweatshops. We analyze the morality of three cases of sweatshop boycotts—Indonesia in the 1990s, Bangladesh following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, and the Uyghur region in China—and then discuss how insights from these cases might provide a model to guide activists and business ethicists in analyzing the morality of other sweatshop boycotts.

Free riding involves benefiting from common resources or services while avoiding contributing to their production and maintenance. Few studies have adequately investigated the propensity to overestimate the prevalence of free riding. This is a significant omission, as exaggeration of the phenomenon is often used to justify control and coercion systems. To address this gap, we investigate how the common good approach may mitigate the flaws of a system excessively focused on free-riding risk. In this conceptual paper featuring illustrative vignettes, we argue that the common good perspective is realistic and effective in preventing this excessive attention by promoting trust as an unconditional gift and a response to vulnerability. We discuss the common good perspective’s originality over the dominant approaches and propose a set of ethical and managerial recommendations that may be the best protection against this excessive focus and maybe even against free riding itself.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial capitalism is well known, with some arguing that MacIntyrean thought is antithetical to contemporary capitalist business. Nevertheless, substantial efforts have been taken to demonstrate how different business activities constitute MacIntyrean practices, which points to an incoherence at the heart of MacIntyrean business ethics scholarship. This article proposes a way of bridging these perspectives, suggesting a reimagined MacIntyrean approach to business that is thoroughly ‘practice-led.’ A detailed comparison of accounting and management shows that while neither are practices in ‘good order,’ they differ in significant ways: where management does not meet the criteria for a MacIntyrean practice, accounting is a ‘distorted’ practice. This leads to a categorisation of practice-led business activity, whereby the traditional tasks of management are subsumed, shared or subordinated to practices and practitioners. Insights on how this can be implemented are drawn from the ‘communities of practice’ literature and a consideration of professions.

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus.

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era.