Matthias Kettner

Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer have been very successful, in terms of impact in the business community, in introducing a new management framework whose programmatic title points to the creation of shared value. However, their impact is due not to the scientific merit of their classic 2011 paper, which is indeed low, as many scholarly commentators have already pointed out. In my paper, I will explain the surprising discrepancy between impact and scientific quality and then draw a lesson from it that we as theoreticians of business ethics may find hard to swallow: modesty in the face of the real conditions of communicative propagation, uptake, and success of conceptual management frames. Alluding to Nelson Goodman, it seems that a good conceptual management frame should provide managers with a new way of symbolic worldmaking; it should help managers with their world disclosure; its bearing is primarily practical.I explain the successful propagation of the CVS notion by reference to a number of factors: a cultural dynamics of fame very similar to the contemporary pop star system, a strategy of reducing complexity by deflecting attention from precursors, entrepreneurial self-promotion, club building mechanisms, tactical devaluation of alternative management frames, the creation of a peer group around a buzzword, the attractiveness of the hip and the en vogue, and finally and most importantly, the strength of a rhetoric that permits us to do two incongruous things at once: understand ourselves as change-agents contributing to nothing less than the glorious reinvention of capitalism, and stay firmly within today’s capitalism’s comfort zone without essentially changing anything. I go on to point out three massive shortcomings of the CSV framework: Its poor axiology, its inability to quantify polyvalues, and its conventional rationality assumptions. In the final part of my paper, I suggest a discourse ethical alternative concerning the really important issue that Porter and Kramer 2011 take as their starting point, namely the problem of a legitimation crisis of present-day capitalism.

This paper deals with the question whether some morally normative content is grounded in the dialogical practice that both Apel and Habermas call argumentative discourse, and if so how to demonstrate that it is so grounded. Apel (unlike Habermas) claims that discourse has rationally necessary conceptual presuppositions; that morally normative content is part of such presuppositions; and that this can be ascertained in transcendendal reflection, i.e. by a kind of transcendental argument. I argue that these claims can be charitably interpreted but require clarifications of their key concepts, i.e. “discourse”, “validity claims”, “performative self-contradiction”, and “community of communication”. I argue that discourse as a practice of reason-sensitive agents who are communicatively connected via argumentation can be explained by its normatively constitutive aim, namely fixing the true values of our reasons; that the primary level of validity claims are claims concerning good reasons; that performative self-contradictions are pragmatic-cum-logical inconsistencies that we can know apriori to be incompatible with discourse’s constitutive aim; and finally, that competent discourse participants can know apriori that they would be performatively inconsistent if they flouted a moral kernel that is intrinsic in discourse.

We judge actions to be rational if means are adequate to ends. In modern societies, innumerable actions are interconnected into complex systems. Does rationality, then, become a feature of systems? If so, it will not do to view means in the light of ends, Niklas Luhmann maintained. In ‘The Concept of Purpose and Systems Rationality’ (‘Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität’) (1968), he defined the rationality of systems as their capacity to reduce complexity (“Reduktion von Komplexität”); in his later work, Luhmann elaborated and partly transformed that account. Dorschel and Kettner put his views under scrutiny.

Die philosophiegeschichtlichen, sprachphilosophischen, rationalitäts- und wissenschaftstheoretischen Versuche einer Transformation der Philosophie, der Karl-Otto Apels Lebenswerk gilt, bezeichnet Apel deshalb als »Transzendentalpragmatik«, weil sie ihren Einheitssinn in dem Gedanken finden, daß nichts außer der menschlichen Praxis des Argumentierens die kontexttranszendierende Gültigkeit unserer Meinungen über Tatsachen und Normen ermöglicht. Die einzelnen Beiträge beleuchten Konsequenzen und Probleme des transzendentalpragmatischen Programms in einem breiten Spektrum gegenwärtiger philosophischer Diskussionen, das von theoretischen Fragen der Bedeutungstheorie bis zu praktischen Fragen eines modernitätskritischen Dialogs zwischen »Erster« und »Dritter« Welt reicht.