AC351 Business Ethics Lecture 4 Contemporary Ethical Philosophy: Marxist, feminist, postmodern appro

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AC351Business EthicsLecture 4Contemporary
Ethical PhilosophyMarxist, feminist, postmodern
approaches.

• Stevphen Shukaitis
• Essex Business School
• 2008/09

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Critique of B/Es use of traditional moral
philosophy contributions of Marxism, feminism
and postmodernism.

• Classic ethical theory used in a way that lacks a
  radical edge (Jones et al 2005 Ch 1).
• Marxist ethics as enabling a radical critique of
  capitalism and business.
• Abstract reason and a distance characterise the
  use of ethics might this lead to a loss of moral
  concern? (Bauman 1993 Ch 1.Derry 2002)
• Feminist and postmodern ethics as reintroducing
  closeness and emotions into ethics.
• Search for universal rules masks a process of
  normalisation and exclusion.
• Feminist and postmodern ethics as stressing how
  rationality and universality have excluded some
  from the status of being moral subjects
• Moral philosophy used in a way that is reassuring
  and promotes a false certainty.
• Postmodernism as stressing an ethics of continual
  questioning and radical doubt.

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Marxist ethical contributions

• Moral philosophy is used by Business Ethics in a
  way that reduces its radical, questioning edge.
• More often than not it is thought that the role
  of business ethics is to add something on to
  present business practices, to make minor
  adjustment in order to make things more
  ethical. And as a result, the task that ethics
  was originally intended to achieve a radical
  questioning of how it is that we should live and
  work has all but disappeared from books and
  journals on business ethics.
• (Jones et al 2005139)
• Marxist ethics as a radical critique of business,
  capitalism and the social relations it enshrines.
• Founded upon a notion of the unique and ethically
  sacrosanct nature of human potential.

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Marxist conceptualisation of human nature

• The Architect and the Bee (Marx, 1867 in
  McLellan 1980 174-175)
• What defines our humanity is the unique potential
  to engage in purposeful labour
• And to (re)fashion the world and ourselves by
  engaging in self-directed, cooperative actions.
• Therefore not one human nature but rather an
  unending, socially fashioned, potential.
• Respecting and encouraging this human potential,
  this essential human freedom, is the ethical
  imperative
• (echoes here of Kants imperative to respect
  others moral dignity).

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Marxist ethics as an extension and critique of
notions of freedom underpinning capitalism.

• Capitalism is founded upon and legitimised by an
  ethic of human freedom.
• Which is conceived negatively and individually.
• Negative because it is based upon the formal
  freedom from coercion, freedom from others (Fromm
  2001). This freedom is manifest in property
  relations the individuals right to own that
  which they accrue.
• Marxist ethics can be read as starting with this
  ethic of freedom (Brenkert 1983 Wray-Bliss and
  Parker 1998). But arguing that it is understood
  and manifested in a self-defeating way in
  capitalism
• Individuals work so as to separate themselves
  from others through the accumulation of wealth
  and property.
• Such separation constructs a society founded upon
  isolation, competition and conflict. With
  individuals, and classes of people, exploiting
  others so as to accrue more wealth for themselves
  and/or resentful of their own exploitation.
• Ultimately, society becomes composed of
  individuals who have lost (become alienated from,
  Marx 1844) their sense of their own humanity or
  defining essence. Both the wealthy and the rest
  have substituted the pursuit of property and
  wealth in place of their conscious and deliberate
  cooperation in fashioning the world they inhabit.
  

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Marxist Ethics and Business Ethics

• Capitalism, therefore, is seen as stifling human
  freedom.
• Both the capitalist system, and those
  institutions which support it and sustain it
  (such as businesses, managers, etc) are opened up
  to a radical ethical questioning.
• Further, it follows that those acts in opposition
  to capitalism, and in favour of more
  solidaristic/ community orientated and
  un-alienated practices are seen as good.
• In direct contrast to mainstream Business Ethics
  assumption of the goodness of management
  control and business, a Marxist ethics enables us
  critique the fundamental functioning of business
  and to explore resistance to managerial
  authority, commercialism and other forms of
  exploitation as ethical. (Wray-Bliss and Parker
  1998)

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Feminist and Postmodern ethical contributions

• Business Ethics is dominated by traditional
  ethical philosophy that privileges abstract
  reasoning, dispassionate calculation and
  depersonalisation as the basis of ethics.
• From feminist and postmodern ethical positions,
  such approaches to ethics can be argued to have
  contributed to forms of exclusion and moral
  distancing that do not serve ethics well.

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A feminist and postmodern critique of ethical
exclusions.

• Traditional philosophical ethics privileges
  abstract reasoning and calculation.
• Certain groups of people (black people, women,
  the working class, etc) have been historically
  portrayed as lacking the ability to reason
  sufficiently in these ways (Held 1997).
• This has contributed to their exclusion from the
  category of subjects entitled to decide their own
  ethical choices such choices and decisions have
  been made for them instead.
• Rather than the freedom to live according to
  their own ethical values, they have been cast in
  the role of being subordinate to other, elite
  peoples, rules and codes.
• (the next lecture picks up on some of the
  implications of this point with regard to ethical
  codes in organisations, see Maclagan, 2007
  Schwartz, 2000)

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Reason, ethics and exclusion

• The great majority of the population has been
  classified out of moral self-sufficiency and
  self-management. Their aspirations to make
  choices (if such aspirations made themselves at
  all felt), their singly or severally made
  attempts to elide the assigned identities were
  consequently criminalized as conduct deserving
  penalty, or requiring intensive treatment, or
  both.
• The rest embraced was quite voluminous and
  entailed categories of varying degree of ethical
  incapacitation and untrustworthiness. Inferior
  races backward, lacking in wisdom and
  intelligence, both childlike in their inability
  to think ahead and dangerous in the untamed
  physical potency which they deployed in
  short-lived bursts of passion. The poor and
  indigent moved by dark impulses rather than
  reason, greedy yet unable to eke out their
  welfare through thrift and hard work, easily
  diverted from duty by sensual pleasures,
  improvident themselves yet jealous of the fruits
  of other peoples prudence. Women endowed or
  burdened with great admixture of animality than
  their male counterparts, incapable of following
  the voice of reason consistently since constantly
  in danger of being diverted and led astray by
  emotions.
• What united such sharply distinct classes of
  people, rendering them objects of choice rather
  than choosers, and thus a source and the target
  of ethical-reformatory-punitive concern, was the
  feature of moral incapacity imputed to them all.
  (Bauman, 1993 120-121)

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Reassessing the rationality of ethics.

• The feminist author Gilligan (1997) conducted
  research arguing that women and men conceptualise
  ethics differently. Women tended toward notions
  of ethics as care, compassion, love, and
  connectedness. Men towards more abstract and
  depersonalised notions of duty, rules,
  calculations. Whether we accept Gilligans
  essentialism, the refocusing upon emotions and
  relationships in matters of ethics is valuable.
• Postmodern writer Bauman (1993 Ch 4-5) draws
  upon the work of the philosopher Levinas to argue
  that the felt impulse towards the Other,
  towards others vulnerability, is the basis of
  ethics. It is precisely the irrational nature of
  ethics that makes it ethics. I act because I
  feel I must act. Reducing ethics to calculation
  or rationality means ethics is too easily
  rationalised away.
• Levinas the Face of the Other their real
  humanity - is the foundation of ethics. Not some
  reasoned duty or impartial calculation (Bauman
  1993, Ch 4-5 Byers and Rhodes 2007 Jones et al
  2005, Ch 6).

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A feminist and postmodern critique of moral
distancing.

• Traditional moral philosophy privileges distance
  from the people or issues involved so as to make
  an appropriate ethical judgement.
• E.g. Kant performing ones moral duty without
  regard to ones relationships or emotions.
• E.g. Utilitarianism making large scale
  calculations of harms and benefits, specifically
  ignoring any particular individuals case.
• Such distancing may enable and encourage a loss
  of moral concern (Benhabib 1987), a loss of the
  felt impetus to take responsibility and to act
• (for a graphic illustration see e.g. Milgram
  1974, and lecture 8).

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The generals bunker or CEOs boardroom may be a
good place from which to devise abstract
strategies. But is such distance from other
people conducive for developing ethical regard
for them?
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Ethics and the importance of doubtPostmodernism

• Business Ethics as using moral philosophy to
  provide reassurance or neat intellectual answers
  to business problems.
• From a postmodern perspective, the proper ethical
  attitude is one of continual doubt and
  uncertainty. To keep pushing ourselves to
  consider what is wrong with our current
  practices.

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Ethics and the importance of doubtPostmodernism

• Postmodernism as an extension, and critique, of
  Enlightenment ideals.
• The Enlightenment
• The rise of the scientific world view (15th to
  17th Century in Europe)
• Critique of authority, the dominance of the
  church, the aristocracy, tradition.
• Emergence of the belief in the superiority of
  reason over faith, superstition, custom. The
  importance of questioning and of rational
  critique.
• Critique, reason, rationality etc seen as tied to
  social progress, emergence from authority,
  refusal of arbitrary claims to power or status,
  refusal of historical forms of dominance.
• The Enlightenment as the bringing of light to the
  world, reason, rationality and progress.
• Postmodernism as continuing the critical,
  questioning approach of the enlightenment and
  radicalising it.
• Subjecting new faiths to critique e.g. faith
  in science, truth, progress, civilisation, even
  reason itself.
• Such ideas themselves implicated in new forms of
  subordination and oppression.
• E.g. Foucaults critiques of prisons, mental
  health treatment, hospitals (see McNay 1994).
• E.g. Bauman (1989) critique of modern
  organisation, ethical rules, hierarchy etc.
• For an earlier critic, influential for the
  postmodern mindset, ethics itself was to be
  rejected (see Nietzsche 1887 2007).

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Ethics and the importance of doubtPostmodernism

• Culminating in a view of ethics as characterised
  by the importance of continual uncertainty,
  radical doubt, questioning taken-for-granteds.
  The ethical disposition of always questioning the
  rightness of what exists.
• it is moral anxiety that provides the only
  substance the moral self could ever have. What
  makes the moral self is the urge to do, not the
  knowledge of what is to be done the unfulfilled
  task, not the duty correctly performed This
  uncertainty with no exit is precisely the
  foundation of morality. One recognizes morality
  by its gnawing sense of unfulfilledness, by its
  endemic dissatisfaction with itself. The moral
  self is a self always haunted by the suspicion
  that it is not moral enough. (Bauman, 1993 80)
• My point is not that everything is bad, but
  that everything is dangerous, which is not
  exactly the same as bad. If everything is
  dangerous, then we always have something to do.
  (Foucault, 1984 343)

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Feminist ethics, postmodern ethics and Business
Ethics.

• Ethics as proximity, closeness, relationships -
  not intellectual distancing.
• Need to be very cautious of the ways that we
  distance ourselves from others in organisations
  and business. For instance by rank, role,
  hierarchy, place in organisation, outsourcing,
  etc (see Bauman 1989 Ch. 8/9 and Lecture 8)
• Ethics as concerned with ones responsibility and
  connectedness to real, living others not abstract
  concepts or laws (Benhabib 1987).
• Ethics legitimately based upon the emotional or
  irrational.
• Ethics as characterised by uncertainty, doubt,
  and continual critique.
• Feminist and postmodern ethics present a powerful
  critique of the rationalistic, abstract, and
  reassuring nature of ethical discussion in
  mainstream Business Ethics and in organisational
  ethics policies.

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Summary The contribution ofMarxist, feminist,
postmodern approaches.

• Mainstream Business Ethics has been criticised
  for
• the narrow range of moral philosophy it draws
  upon
• and the ways that it uses this philosophy
• Marxist, feminist, and postmodern ethics
• may enable a more radical and far reaching
  ethical examination of capitalism and business
  practice than the one presently offered in B/E.
• question the appropriateness of an abstract,
  rationalist and emotionally distanced approach to
  ethics and provides some alternative
  conceptualisations based upon emotion,
  connectedness and relationships.
• ask questions of a Business Ethics that uses
  moral philosophy to reassure or provide neat
  answers stresses the importance of a radical,
  continually questioning ethical doubt about
  current practices.

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Bibliography

• Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust
  Cambridge, Polity. (paperback edition)
• Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics Oxford,
  Blackwell.
• Benhabib, S. (1987) The generalised and the
  concrete other. In E. Frazer, J. Hornsby S.
  Lovibond (Eds.), Ethics A feminist reader.
  Oxford Blackwell.
• Brenkert, G. (1983) Marxs Ethics of Freedom Law
  book company of Australasia.
• Byers, D. and Rhodes, C. (2007) Ethics,
  alterity, and organizational justice. Business
  Ethics A European Review, 16(3) 239-250
• Derry, R. (2002) Feminist theory and business
  ethics in Frederick, R. (Ed.) A companion to
  business ethics Oxford Blackwell.
• Foucault, M. (1984) On the Genealogy of Ethics
  An Overview of Work in Progress, in P. Rabinow
  (ed.) The Foucault Reader, pp. 34072.
  Harmondsworth Penguin.
• Fromm, E. (2001) The fear of freedom London
  Routledge.
• Gilligan, C. (1997) In a different voice
  Womens conceptions of self and morality in
  Meyers, D. (Ed.) Feminist social thought A
  reader London, Routledge.

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Bibliography

• Jones, C. Parker, M. and Ten Bos, R. (2005) For
  Business Ethics London Routledge
• Maclagan, P. (2007) Hierarchical control or
  individuals' moral autonomy? Addressing a
  fundamental tension in the management of business
  ethics Business Ethics A European Review 16(1)
  48-61
• Marx, K. (1844) Alienated Labour (in any
  collected works of Marxs early writings)
• McLellan, D. (1980) The Thought of Karl Marx
  Macmillan London.
• McNay, L. (1994) Foucault A critical
  introduction. Cambridge Polity Press,
• Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority New
  York Harper and Row, Chapters 1and 15.
• Nietzsche, F. (1887 2007) On the Genealogy of
  Morality Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
• Schwartz, M. (2000). Why ethical codes
  constitute an unconscionable regression. Journal
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• Wray-Bliss and Parker (1998) Marxism, Capitalism
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