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Journal of Business Ethics

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28-03-2015

Behavioral Ethics: A Critique and a Proposal

Authors: Carol Frogley Ellertson, Marc-Charles Ingerson, Richard N. Williams

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 1/2016

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Abstract

In behavioral ethics today, there is debate as to which theory of moral development is the best for understanding ethical decision making, thereby facilitating ethical behavior. This debate between behavioral ethicists has been profoundly influenced by the field of moral psychology. Unfortunately, in the course of this marriage between moral psychology and business ethics and subsequent internal debate, a simple but critical understanding of human being in the field of management has been obscured; i.e., that morality is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. Therefore, in this paper, we will argue that there is a need in behavioral ethics to shift our understanding away from the influence of contemporary moral psychology and back to management theorist Ghoshal’s (Acad Manag Learn Educ 4(1):75–91, 2005) view of what it means to be human in which the moral is fundamental. To assist in this labor, we will build on the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics, regardless of the setting, as a metaphysical concern. What this means is that Levinas sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regard to understanding the nature and action of the individual, including within organizations. Thus, morality in any sphere of human endeavor, including in business, is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality.

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The “is to ought” dilemma (known as Hume’s guillotine) has been articulated most notably by the Scottish philosopher Hume (1739/2001). He observed that many writers in his day made claims about what ought to be, on the basis of statements about what is. He asserts that there is a significant difference (or what we term in this paper as an ontological gap) between descriptive statements (about what is) and prescriptive statements (about what ought to be).

In “From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Psychological Fallacy and Get Away with It in the Study of Moral Development,” Kohlberg sought to solve the “is to ought” dilemma by demonstrating a “parallelism” between psychological descriptions and philosophical-normative analyses of his stages. This parallelism, he contended, led to a kind of complementarity and even a convergence of the two analyses (see Power et al. 1989).

It should be noted that "ethics," in Levinas's philosophical project does not mean what is typically referred to as ethics or even morality, that is—a code of conduct that cultivates virtues or employs rationalist self legislation about how one should act. Derrida (1976) notes that Levinas does not want to propose laws or moral rules but to propose an ethics of ethics. In other words, Levinas does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general. Since “the moral” in this paper is also defined in a broader sense as beyond rationality and fundamental to humanity (see p. 9 herein), for the purposes of this paper, the terms “ethical” and “moral” will be used interchangeably.

Agency defined as “having the world truthfully,” rather than merely making free choices from among alternatives is to say that “living truthfully” is the proper, effective, appropriate recognition of the differences inherent in an act or situation. Agents participate in the world in a way that truthfully articulates the differences something makes, or rather, the morality of the activity (Williams and Gantt 2002).

In continental philosophy, the Constitutive Other often denotes persons identified as “different” and in Levinas’s case as “infinite.” It denotes “alterity” or “otherness” in general, not specifically. Thus, the term “other” often is capitalized to signify this representation of difference, of alterity, of infiniteness.

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Title: Behavioral Ethics: A Critique and a Proposal
Authors: Carol Frogley Ellertson
Marc-Charles Ingerson
Richard N. Williams
Publication date: 28-03-2015
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 1/2016
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2628-y

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