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Alternative Approaches to Applied Ethics: A Response to Carson’s Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

David M. Holley
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Abstract:

Tom Carson’s recent paper on “Deception and Withholding Information in Sales” contains a critique of my contribution to sales ethics. In this response I outline the approach I develop in two earlier papers and address the four criticisms Carson makes. These criticisms are largely based on a misunderstanding of my position. I suggest that our fundamentally different approaches to applied ethics may lie at the root of Carson’s misunderstanding. Carson uses what I call a theory-application model in which the search for justification in terms of fundamental rules is central, while I attempt to contextualize ethical judgments and consider alternative ways of structuring social roles. In contrasting these approaches I raise the question of which way of doing applied ethics is likely to be more fruitful.

Type
Response Article
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 2002 , pp. 73 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2002

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References

Notes

1 Thomas Carson, “Deception and Withholding Information in Sales,” Business Ethics Quarterly 11 (2001): 275–306. Page references in the text are to this article.

2 David M. Holley, “A Moral Evaluation of Sales Practices,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 5 (1987): 3–21.

3 David M. Holley, “Information Disclosure in Sales,” Journal of Business Ethics 17 (1998): 631–641.

4 Carson’s separation of lying and deception strikes me as unhelpful because it uncouples the concept of deception from the wrong-making characteristics that we are concerned to prohibit. He says that lies that do not succeed in producing a false belief are not instances of deception. However, when we use the category of deception to forbid certain actions, we are forbidding actions intended to produce a false belief, whether they are successful or not. Both lies and misleading truths, as well as some omissions can violate our rules against deception, and we don’t have to measure their success to determine whether an act of deception has been performed.

5 In retrospect I should have used the word “need” instead of “want” in the practical guide, but even that wording is subject to misunderstanding when the context in which the suggestion is made is ignored.

6 In the one paragraph where Carson addresses my paper on information disclosure, he criticizes the criterion of reasonable judgment as allowing for cases where it is “unclear or open to debate” whether certain information needs to be given. However, he ignores the ways the discussion in this paper works toward clarifying the criterion and the role of the examples in providing clarity. I get the impression that he imagines we can state useful rules that draw precise lines without leaving anything “open to debate” and without relying on the kind of knowledge that we only get from paradigmatic examples. Later in this paper I suggest that we are working with different understandings of the nature and function of moral rules.

7 In several other recent papers I discuss the related question of dealing with situations in which role expectations are not clearly specified or have over time broken down. See my “Everyone’s Doing It: Common Practice and Moral Judgment,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 31 (1997): 369–380, and “Breaking the Rules When Others Do,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 14 (1997): 159–168.