Daryl Koehn

This book presents not only many of Daryl Koehn’s historically well-known papers analyzing business ethics using Western and Asian virtue ethics, but also some of her more recent, previously unpublished work on the ethics and politics of the corporate form. Researching cutting edge issues emerging within the field, Koehn was the first business ethicist to describe and critique the new benefit corporations and to analyze multi-level marketing schemes. In addition, she is one of the few business ethicists to have delved into the purpose and nature of the early American corporation. This history is hugely relevant to what we mean by "corporate responsibility." Despite its relevance, this topic, especially the very early history of business corporations in America, has been largely neglected by business ethicists. In addition, this volume showcases the many illuminating insights that emerge when the practice of business is seen in light of classical virtue ethics and the modern conception of character. The Future of Business Ethics includes papers exploring both Aristotelian and Confucian virtue ethics and the modern Kantian concept of character. Finally, very little new work has been done within business ethics to pioneer new ways of thinking about why fraud occurs and about how to recover from corporate wrongdoing. The psychological approach to fraud and the analysis of corporate apologies presented in the third section of the book does this new spadework, making this book of great interest to all those working in the fields of business ethics and virtue ethics.

How exactly individual flourishing and societal flourishing are connected is a central question in social sciences in general and in business ethics in particular. We argue that the main theories of flourishing have developed along a trajectory going from Aristotle to Aquinas and then to the current, prevailing understanding of the relation between individual and societal flourishing. This relationship has been theorized in terms of the pursuit and achievement of the “societal good.” This concept of “societal good” includes three distinct concepts: mutual advantage, the common good, and the collective good. In this paper, we meticulously distinguish these concepts, tracing the concept of mutual advantage back to Aristotle, the common good to St. Thomas Aquinas, and the collective good to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers. Our failure to be clear about the significant differences among these three concepts means we have not always understood exactly what is at stake in favoring (explicitly or implicitly) one notion over another. We argue that many business ethicists have adopted a collectivist approach, which, in subordinating ethics to politics, poses a significant threat to human dignity and thus to flourishing at both the individual and community level. Other business ethicists have argued for the adoption of an Aristotelian understanding of _eudaimonia_ or flourishing, but that approach, too, may threaten human dignity. Although Aristotle stresses a politically embedded individual who possesses the authoritative agency to achieve his or her own flourishing while pursuing interests shared with other members of the polis, Aristotle’s approach may be less effective than that of Aquinas when it comes to safeguarding the worth of each human being in the modern economy and society. Adopting a Thomistic approach to the common good, an approach which does not make ethics subservient to politics, offers a dignity-respecting and community-enhancing way for ethicists to rethink key elements of business management, including leadership, strategy, organization theory, human resources, and entrepreneurship.

As each week beings more stories of doctors, lawyers and other professionals abusing their powers, while clients demand extra services as at a time of shrinking resources; it is imperative that all practising professionals have an understanding of professional ethics. In _The Ground of Profesional Ethics_, Daryl Koehn discusses the practical issues in depth, such as the level of service clients can justifiably expect from professionals, when service to a client may be legitimately terminated and circumstances in which client confidences can be broken. She argues that, while clients may legitimately expect professionals to promote their interests, professionals are not morally bound to do whatever a client wants. _The Ground of Professional Ethics_ is important reading for all practising professionals, as well as those who study or have an interest in the subject of professional ethics.

Although many developments are occurring that have the potential both to redefine what we mean by capitalism and how companies operate within an evolving capitalistic system, there are reasons to be skeptical as to whether this potential will be realized and whether all of these developments will prove to be unambiguously ethically good. Part One provides a brief overview of earlier stages of capitalism and then touches upon the emergence of benefit corporations, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measures of social performance, and political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as elements in the next stage of capitalism. Part Two examines the rethinking of corporate purposes implicit in benefit corporations, ESG metrics, and PCSR. Part Three argues that any new stage of capitalism likely will manifest itself either within or as a digital market economy (DME), a form of economy that some critics have judged to be ethically problematic in its essence. If that judgment is sound, then it is misleading to focus only on developments at the meso-level of changes in corporate purpose without critically examining (1) the larger macro-level context (DME) in which all corporations as such are now operating and (2) the effect of the DME on ethical norms themselves. I conclude with some ruminations on what we as individuals might do to combat some pernicious aspects of new stage capitalism.

As each week beings more stories of doctors, lawyers and other professionals abusing their powers, while clients demand extra services as at a time of shrinking resources; it is imperative that all practising professionals have an understanding of professional ethics. In _The Ground of Profesional Ethics_, Daryl Koehn discusses the practical issues in depth, such as the level of service clients can justifiably expect from professionals, when service to a client may be legitimately terminated and circumstances in which client confidences can be broken. She argues that, while clients may legitimately expect professionals to promote their interests, professionals are not morally bound to do whatever a client wants. _The Ground of Professional Ethics_ is important reading for all practising professionals, as well as those who study or have an interest in the subject of professional ethics.

As each week beings more stories of doctors, lawyers and other professionals abusing their powers, while clients demand extra services as at a time of shrinking resources; it is imperative that all practising professionals have an understanding of professional ethics. In _The Ground of Profesional Ethics_, Daryl Koehn discusses the practical issues in depth, such as the level of service clients can justifiably expect from professionals, when service to a client may be legitimately terminated and circumstances in which client confidences can be broken. She argues that, while clients may legitimately expect professionals to promote their interests, professionals are not morally bound to do whatever a client wants. _The Ground of Professional Ethics_ is important reading for all practising professionals, as well as those who study or have an interest in the subject of professional ethics.

The idea of responsibility lies at the heart of the Anglo-American criminal legal system. Perpetrators are deemed responsible for wrongdoing if they can be shown to have intentionally harmed other individuals. While this equating of responsibility with intentional agency has some merits, it suffers from numerous serious defects, including a limited applicability to the whole of human existence, an overly optimistic assumption that we can unfailingly know another person’s intentions, and a tendency to reduce responsibility to accountability.

Foreseeing a technologically produced disaster on the horizon, Hans Jonas proposes an ethics of care. Caring consists in accepting and then discharging one overarching responsibility—to act to ensure that the world does not become uninhabitable for human beings and other organisms. Why do we have such a responsibility? How did we get to this point of crisis? How far can we go in sacrificing current human interests to secure future human welfare? Is this Jonasian approach too individualistic to deal with current and future challenges? Is Jonasian caring really a form of responsibility, or have we again substituted accountability for responsibility?

Hannah Arendt argues for a kind of public communicative responsibility grounded not in human nature but in the human condition of plurality and natality and in the nature of thinking itself. Responsibility so understood avoids many of the pitfalls associated with the intentional agency idea of responsibility. However, it raises additional issues. What motivates us to think? Is she privileging the private over the public? If so, is such a hierarchy ethically sound? If we are always to be judging and punishing others, are we not again reducing responsibility to accountability?

Plato’s Socrates embodies a radically different understanding of responsibility. Responsibility is a way of life rooted in an acceptance that we lack scientific, technical knowledge of the good life, virtues and vices. Life here means engaging oneself and others in ongoing discussions about ethical matters. Why, though, is such a life desirable? Is dialogical responsibility so individualistic that it cannot apply to collective entities such as corporations? If we all lack technical knowledge of ethical matters, must we embrace ethical relativism? Is every dialogue or discussion a responsible one? Are there any conditions that these discussions must meet?

The Anglo-American tradition has understood responsibility largely in terms of intentional agency or role-based duties. Yet this approach increasingly appears inadequate to deal with pressing new issues arising in connection with climate change, transformations being wrought by artificial intelligence, and bureaucratic institutions that diffuse accountability. Which alternative approaches to responsibility exist? Might they enable us to better address such issues? Or are these ideas equally problematic? This chapter sketches the current dominant Anglo-American idea of responsibility and two alternative approaches grounded in human nature and the human condition. I argue that none of these conceptions are adequate to the challenges we currently face and provide some reasons for why we would be better served by embracing a classical, Platonic concept of responsibility. This concept keeps the act of responding within responsibility and avoids reducing it to mere accountability.

This paper offers a neo-Aristotelian approach to PCSR aimed at enabling us to more systematically ascertain which sorts of corporate political activities, if any, might be politically acceptable. Part 1 sketches Aristotle’s account of the “political.” Aristotelian politics have at least four key dimensions. When we speak of PCSR, we should, from this Aristotelian perspective, evaluate how specific behaviors accord with or undermine these four aspects of political life. Part 2 of the paper explores which forms of activity by corporations qualify as genuinely (and thus acceptably) political within a neo-Aristotelian framework. Part 3 highlights strengths and limitations of this approach to PCSR.

The long-term health of business ethics is suspect. In particular, there are some troubling trends within the discipline’s methodology that should be closely monitored and, in some cases, countered. Furthermore, business ethicists and management theorists should take some steps to make business ethics more robust and more relevant to actual business practice. Part 1 of this article argues that, while the dominance of the social science approach should be curtailed, relations between normative and empirical scholars need not be hostile; on the contrary, there are some modest ways in which the two approaches could complement each other more than they have to date. Part 2 examines why business ethics needs more systems thinking. Part 3 explores why business ethicists in general should follow the lead of some of our colleagues who are engaging in powerful and influential research with direct and immediate practical applications. The article closes with a few modest suggestions for enhancing business ethics theorizing and provides some concrete ways for scholars to become more involved with business practitioners and business practice and to learn from the latter in ways that can productively feed research streams.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, "Ethics is aesthetics." It is unclear what such a claim might mean and whether it is true. This book explores contentious issues arising at the interface of ethics and aesthetics. The contributions reflect on the status of aesthetic en ethical judgments, the relation of aesthetic beauty and ethical goodness and art and character development. The book further considers the potential role art could play in ethical analysis and in the classroom and explores in what respects aesthetics and ethics might be intertwined and even mutually supportive.

Applied ethicists’ interest in narratives and narratives ethics has grown steadily. Some thinkers position narratives as supplements to ethics, while others see narratives as new form of ethics comparable to virtue or deontological ethics. In this paper, I analyze some of the main ethical claims being made on behalf of business and literary narratives from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that, while narratives can significantly contribute to the development of our character, to a better grasp of virtues and vices, and to a clarification of a virtue ethics framework, this contribution is highly nuanced. In particular, Aristotelian virtue ethics enable us to sensibly and helpfully distinguish the ethical value of _narratives within business ethics_ from _narrative business ethics _per se. This paper has three parts. Part One offers a provisional definition of narrative and sketches some of the large claims that literary critics, philosophers, theologians, and others have made for narratives’ relevance to and value for ethics. In Part Two, using narratives drawn from business and literature, I take up each of these claims in turn and examine whether the claim makes sense and is compelling from an Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective. Part Three gathers together the threads of the arguments in Part Two to specify the modest, but nonetheless significant, legitimate roles narratives might play within Aristotle’s virtue ethics. I also point to some limitations inherent in an Aristotelian critique of narrative ethics and suggest some questions for future research.

What is humane work? What does such work look like in a business context? This paper articulates two ways of thinking about humane work using an Aristotelian and a Confucian virtue ethics approach. This approach reveals the need to think about (1) work’s connection not merely with autonomy but with self-refinement and self-perfection, with craft, and with the production of genuinely good goods; (2) possible dangers (e.g., the risk of generating envy) of focusing too much on pay issues in connection with humane work; (3) the relation between humane work and political regimes; and (4) the role played by stakeholders other than managers in the humanizing of work.

When we think of ethics in medicine or business, we typically focus on whether the dignity and autonomy of patients and stakeholders are being respected. Ethicists have devoted a great deal of energy to showing how particular practices either foster or damage healthy personal relations. It is my contention that these analyses, while sometimes insightful, do not grapple with the key question: What does it mean to act in an increasingly technological age? Is it legitimate simply to apply some set of standard ethical categories to evaluate good and bad practices in medicine or business? This article argues that this type of applied ethics completely misses the larger ethical issues arising from the fact that our practices, including medicine, have become thoroughly technological in character. Technology by its very nature transforms our practices and our selves. What is more, it alters us in such a way that we simultaneously lose our capacity to judge the meaning and consequences of this transformation.

Behavioral economics is the latest trendy form of economics. Increasingly theorists are advocating using behavioral economics to do normative ethics or claiming that the behavioralists’ findings render normative claims otiose. I argue in this paper that we should be extremely wary when it comes to accepting any such normative pronouncements. I argue that behavioral economics: (a) minimizes and/or misunderstands the role that character and architectonic life goals play in accounting for the why of ethical behavior, (b) fundamentally misconceives human practical rationality, (c) often unduly narrows the range of human action and choice, (d) misleadingly assumes that options are merely given to us rather than generated by us in accordance with our character, (e) is parasitic upon normative ethics, (f) results in an unhelpful ad hoc approach to ethical thinking, which is unlikely to prove all that useful and may even dangerously mislead ordinary agents or those who operate corporate compliance programs and who seek to improve corporate cultures, and (g) ignores the key role played in ethical behavior by meso‐ and macro‐factors.

This book offers a much needed overview of the neglected notion of responsibility. Instead of offering vague talk about “individual responsibility” or “corporate responsibility,” Daryl Koehn examines in detail four accounts of responsibility, taking care to specify what responsibility does and does not mean in each account. She argues for a return to the ancient concept of Socratic dialogical responsibility, a concept that avoids many of the problems inherent in the other accounts. After examining the Anglo-American criminal legal system’s treatment of responsibility as intentional agency, she critiques Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as ontological care and Hannah Arendt’s notion of communicative responsibility. She provides a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to responsibility. The final chapter makes the case for Socratic dialogical responsibility. Dialogical responsibility has many strengths in its own right and avoids the major pitfalls of the other notions of responsibility examined in the book. It serves as an eminently practical way to hold ourselves responsible for our actions and speech. In addition, dialogical responsibility alone qualifies as a virtue integral to the good life.

Confucianism is potentially relevant to business ethics and business practice in many ways. Although some scholars have seen Confucian thought as applicable to corporate social responsibility :433–451, 2009) and to corporate governance :30–43, 2013), only a few business ethicists :415–431, 2001b; Journal of Business Ethics 116:703–715, 2013; Romar in Journal of Business Ethics 38:119–131, 2002; Lam in The Analects, Penguin Classics, London, 2003; Chan in Journal of Business Ethics 77:347–360, 2008; Woods and Lamond in Journal of Business Ethics 102:669–683, 2011) have taken seriously the possibility that Confucius may have important insights to offer regarding virtue ethics, which has now become the most popular normative theory as evidenced by the number of recent articles published in business ethics journals :287–318, 2017). This paper aims to help rectify this oversight. The paper focuses on several distinctive aspects of Confucian ethics, discussing both how Confucius’ approach differs from Aristotelian virtue ethics in significant ways and how these key differences suggest numerous directions for future research.

The B case jumps ahead several years and outlines the turnaround efforts SBM undertook to address its grave missteps: shifting to a consumer-oriented, integrity-focused management style; providing greater transparency and communication; and establishing a corporate ethics committee and a Snow Brands Code of Conduct. In June 2002, after much consideration and reflection on Snow Brand’s issues (as outlined in the A case), Hiwasa joined its new board as its sole outside director, serving as the impetus for the changes the company made. Her appointment indicated SBM was indeed serious about reform and revitalization.