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Authority and Autonomy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Edwin M. Hartman
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Type
Review Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 359 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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References

Notes

2 An anarchist would say that it is not. See for example Wolff (1970), who considers law-abiding citizenship “voluntary slavery.”

3 McMahon does not accept that an explicit promise is a necessary condition of P-authority. The voluntary acceptance of maximum possible benefits will suffice (124).

4 The issue has been a live one since Berle and Means (1934). See Brenkert (1992, 258) for a helpful summary.

5 I think considerations of this sort help to explain why Rorty (1996), a pragmatist, suggests that we stop believing that talk about human rights will help solve or even clarify any important problems.

6 Brenkert (1992; see especially 256f. and 260) takes a different route to a conclusion very similar to McMahon’s.

7 See Elster (especially 1984, chapter II), who wisely refrains from claiming that you are autonomous if you bind yourself into a position in which you later do something that you still later seriously regret.

8 See Sandel (1996, chapter 1), for example.

9 As Gordon Sollars reminds me in correspondence, the libertarian might believe such an organization to be a good thing without believing that any employee has a moral right to it, and still less that a government should require organizations to be that way.

10 Here McMahon might challenge libertarians to say why they think their talk about rights is even helpful in situations like this. Rorty certainly would; see fn. 5.

11 Much of what I know about probable libertarian reactions I have learned from Sollars, but he should not be held responsible for my version of them.

12 I follow MacIntyre (1981) in thinking of March, Simon, and Weber as typical communitarians.

13 MacIntyre (1981, esp. 25) criticizes March and Simon and especially Weber on the same grounds, but rejects the liberal idea that there may always be a variety of competing views of the good life, hence of rationality. The libertarian identification of the desired with the good MacIntyre finds even less attractive.

14 But not if the majority is entrenched. Whether that is the case will occasion some agonizing.

15 At 273f. McMahon seems to agree that this is a possible role of leadership—for example, a leader gives people confidence that others will be collectively rational too—but he does not pursue the point.

16 It is at least possible that the typical restauranteur in the old Jim Crow South would have wished to profit from serving African-American customers but feared being ruined by a whites’ boycott, since other restauranteurs would probably act individually rationally and not follow suit. The public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act imposed C-authority on all white restauranteurs and thereby increased their profits.

17 Keeley (21f.) quotes March and Simon and surveys the damage wrought by those who have taken their organic analogy too seriously. McMahon cites Keeley (58, n. 12) largely approvingly, at least on this point.

18 At 266 McMahon indicates some reluctance to grant liberal rights in organizations because personal projects do not always promote important social values.

19 McMahon applies the notion of supervenience (54-57) to the problem of the status of the organization, and thus avoids granting organizations rights or obligations or, therefore, legitimate authority over and above those of their constituent individuals.

20 McMahon concedes that a democratic society might countenance certain undemocratic organizations. Presumably it would also countenance employment contracts.

21 McMahon disapproves of norms that cause people to do what they would not do in the absence of the norms (193). This suggests that he has a notion of the self as identifiable separately from its social influences—a notion that a communitarian would reject. Solomon (1992) identifies that notion as the single most important problem about contract theory— hence, he would presumably say, about P-authority.

22 McMahon is hardly unaware of all this; see 189-191. But he argues that even participatory management involves authority, and that dissenters do get fired. But of course in some organizations they don’t.

23 McMahon does specify that his views apply primarily to large organizations, and that P-authority may work in small ones (206, for example).

24 This includes McMahon, I think, despite some doubts expressed at 20f. and 281.

25 McMahon is aware of this point. See 1996b, ad fin.

26 See 266. In chapter four McMahon distinguishes between E(expert)-authority and C-authority perhaps more sharply than he ought to if he means to take factual considerations so seriously, and certainly more sharply than a virtue ethicist would.

27 Some of the more interesting work on this topic has been done by David Messick, a psychologist who has a chair in business ethics. (See for example Messick [1998].) The ought-is distinction is controversial within ethics, and in particular in business ethics. See Brink (1989) for a moral realist’s argument that the ought-is gap can indeed be bridged.

28 Rawls’s device of reflective equilibrium is a sophisticated version of this method. It contemplates that our moral intuitions might be altered to fit our theories as well as the other way around.

29 A still further matter is whether the issue in question is one that requires a consensus. Many people who oppose abortion believe that it is not the sort of issue that must remain a private one pending a consensus. As Sandel (1996) notes in his first chapter, one of the crucial problems that liberalism does not solve is this: what sort of issue should a community be liberal about? So we can understand why cultural warriors like Pat Buchanan, who characteristically hold that abortion is not that sort of issue, think a war is appropriate.

30 This may be a result of how seriously we take E-authority in organizations as opposed to the political arena, where expertise and sometimes even education are suspect.

31 McMahon is aware of this; see 262ff.