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Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

Patricia H. Werhane
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Extract

1993: GE’s NBC News unit issues an on-air apology to General Motors for staging a misleading simulated crash test. NBC agrees to pay GM’s estimated $1 million legal and investigation expenses.

February 1994: The Justice Department brought a criminal antitrust case against General Electric, accusing it of conspiring with an arm of the South African DeBeers diamond cartel to fix prices in the $600 million world market for industrial diamonds. General Electric denied wrongdoing...

Type
Section III
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue S1: The Ruffin Series Special Issue No.1 , 1998 , pp. 75 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Business Ethics Quarterly 1998

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References

Endnotes

1 Terence P. Pare, “Jack Welch's Nightmare on Wall Street,” Fortune (September 5, 1994), p. 46.

2 Douglas Frantz and Sylvia Nasar, “F.B.I. Inquiry on Jet Engine, New Jolt to Company Images,” New York Times (July 8, 1994), p. Al, C3.

3 Saul Hansell, “Kidder Reports Fraud and ousts a Top Trader,” New York Times (April 18, 1994), p. Al.

4 Hansel, p. Al.

5 That this just happens in business, of course, is not true. Recently the World Medical Association elected Dr. Hans-Hoachim Sewering, an active participant in the Nazi medical profession's euthanasia activities during the Second World War, to its presidency. Jennifer Leaning, “German Doctors and Their Secrets,” New York Times (February 6, 1993), p. 11.

6 Quoted by Kenneth H. Bacon and Kevin G. Salwen in “Summer of Financial Scandals Raises Questions about the Ability of Regulators to Police Markets,” Wall Street Journal (August 28, 1991), p. A10.

7 See Patricia H. Werhane, “Introducing Morality to Thrift Decision Making,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 2 (1990), pp. 125-131.

8 Railton, Peter, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review, 95 (2), 1986, p. 172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Davidson, Donald, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 48 (1974), p. 5.Google Scholar

10 Putnam, Hilary, Realism With a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 28Google Scholar, requoted with affirmation by Richard Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy xc (1993), p. 443. Original text was italicized.

11 Rorty quoting Putnam (again with approval), p. 443.

12 See for example, Norman Jackson and Carter, Pippa, “In Defence of paradigm incommensurability,” Organization Studies 12 (1991), pp. 109–127Google Scholar.

13 Davidson, p. 5.

14 Davidson, p. 6.

15 See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1953)Google Scholar, Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” pp 443-461, and Putnam, Realism with a Human Face.

16 There is also some confusion in the social science literature on these distinctions. See for example, Gary Weaver and Dennis A. Gioia's paper, “Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs. Structurationist Inquiry,” Organization Studies, 1994, pp. 565 - 590, which summarizes this confusion and attempts to clear it up.

17 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 23, 19.

18 Ibid, 217.

19 To illustrate the question of incommensurability, let us consider a “global” conceptual scheme, for instance, a “world-view” that defines basic physical relationships such as cause and effect, or cosmic relationships between, say, the earth and the sun. As Thomas Kuhn has famously shown, a certain paradigm can function as a schema to shape one's approach to scientific data, and even to science itself, and that kind of scheme or paradigm “takes over” the way we think about nature. It would be weird to argue that the earth circled around Jupiter, for example, given what we know about the solar system and the way in which we organize that knowledge, in f act we would say that such an argument is just wrong. Another conceptual scheme that challenges those findings is, in the first instance contradictory, false, according to the structure of knowledge in that scheme, and in f act, as Copernicus learned, unaccepted by almost everyone. Copernicus’ scheme e. g, that the earth rotates around the sun, brought into question the theory that the earth is the center of the universe. But it did more than that. It tried to falsify the Ptolemaic world-view by challenging its basic assumptions. As this example illustrates, one cannot hold both world-view paradigms, e.g., both the Ptolemaic and Copernican theory of the earth-sun relationship since they contradict each other. One could argue, as Kuhn does, that two “global” schemes are incommensurable with each other since they are two different ways of viewing the universe that contradict each other such that one cannot hold both theories simultaneously. Nevertheless, as we begin to accept a new scheme we understand the structure, truth claims, and status of both, and we are capable of this understanding, because of what Davidson calls a “common coordinate system.” So even if it is true that one cannot hold a Copernican and Ptolemaic view of cosmology at the same time because the two views contradict each other, they are not incommensurable in the stronger sense that one cannot comprehend both nor use the same common (linguistic) coordinate system to talk about each, although the descriptions, terminology, and meanings of terms such as “solar system” will be different in each case. This distinction between incomprehensibility and incomprehensibility is important, because if at least some conceptual schemes are incomprehensible to each other, it is at best difficult to explain how one could change one's world-view. (I am not suggesting that Kuhn thinks these global conceptual schemes are incommensurable in the strong sense, but to clarify what appear to be some misreadings of Kuhn.) See Kuhn's second edition to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), “Postscript-1969,” pp. 174-210.

20 G.E.M. Anscombe, “The Question of Linguistic Idealism,” Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G. H Von Wright, Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 28, ed. Jaakko Hintikka (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1976).

21 See Senge, Peter, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1990)Google Scholar, chapter 10.

22 Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, Chapter Two.

23 See Churchland, Paul, A Neurocomputational Perspective; The Nature of the Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar, cited in Johnson, Mark, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 190-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Gioia, Dennis A., “Pinto Fires and Personal Ethics: A script Analysis if Missed Opportunities,” Journal of Business Ethics 11 (1992), p. 384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Gioia, “Pinto Fires…”, p. 385.

26 Pare, p. 42.

27 See Tichy, Noel M. and Sherman, Stratford, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)Google Scholar for various versions of this declaration.

28 See Martha Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and Moral Imagination,” Chapter 5 of Love-Is Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 157, reprinted from Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. A. Cascardi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 169-191.

29 See Larmore, Charles, “Moral Judgment,:” Review of Metaphysics 35 (1981), p. 279Google Scholar.

30 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) ed. Macfie, A. L. and Raphael, D. D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, I. (I) 1. 1.

31 TMS Li. 1.2.

32 TMS Li. 1.5. See also, Campbell, T. D., Adam Smith's Science of Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971)Google Scholar, Chapter 4.

33 See, for example, Callahan, Joan, “Applied Ethics,” Encyclopedia of Business Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar, and McCollough, Thomas, The Moral Imagination and the Public Life (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, Inc., 1991)Google Scholar.

34 Gioia, “Pinto Fires…,” p. 385. See also, Gioia, D. A., “Symbols, Scripts, and Sensemaking: Creating Meaning in the Organization Experience,” in The Thinking Organization ed. Sims, H. P. Jr. and Gioia, D. A. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986)Google Scholar.

35 Johnson, Moral Imagination, p. 192.

36 Michael J. Young, “Kant's View of Imagination,” Kantstudien 79 (1988), p. 155.

37 See Woods, Michael “Kant's Transcendental Schematism,” Dialectica 37 (1983), pp. 201-20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Young, Michael J., “Kant's View of Imagination,” Kantstudien 79 (1988), pp. 140–164Google Scholar, and Makkreel, Rudolph, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, Chapters 1-3.

38 See Werhane, Patricia H., Philosophical Issues in Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1984), pp. 192-3Google Scholar, Makkreel, Chapter 3, and Mark Johnson, “Imagination in Moral Judgment,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research x 1 vii (1985), pp. 265-80.

39 See Mark Johnson, “Imagination in Moral Judgment,” pp. 270-271. See also Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 70Google Scholar.

40 Kant,

41 Johnson, ”… Moral Judgment,” p. 273.

42 See Tierney, Nathan L., Imagination and Ethical Ideals (New York: SUNY Press, 1994)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3.

43 Johnson, Moral Imagination, p. 202.

44 Johnson, ”… Moral Judgment,” pp. 274-5.

45 Johnson, Moral Imagination, p. 198.

46 Kekes, John, “Moral Imagination, Freedom and the Humanities,” American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991), p. 101.Google Scholar

47 Kekes, p. 102.

48 Gracian, Mack, “Joseph Jett Sparks Media Frenzy,” Black Enterprise, p. 28, August 1994.

49 See Mark Johnson, “Imagination in Moral Judgment,” pp. 276-77 for a somewhat similar analysis. Johnson, however, does not use this analogy with Kant's definitions of imagination.

50 Johnson, Moral Imagination, p. 217.

51 Johnson, “Imagination and Moral Judgment,” p. 277.

52 Johnson, Moral Imagination, p. 217.

53 See, for example, Vargish, Thomas, “The Value of Humanities in Executive Development,” Sloan Management Review 32 (1991), pp. 84–89Google Scholar. See also, Ermarth, E., Sequel to History (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1991Google Scholar. Postmodernism Philosophy and the Arts.

54 See Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, especially Chapters 2 and 4.

55 Amartya Sen, “Positional Objectivity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1993), p. 126.

56 A further buttress for this point of view is Michael Walzer's view of the self. In his recent book, Thick and Thin. Walzer distinguishes a “thick” and a “thin” self. If I understand Walzer's position correctly, Walzer accepts the position that all our experiences are perspectival and constructed. In addition, he argues, who we are as subjects is a late development from our socialization process. In that socialization process we develop a number interests, roles, memberships, commitments and values such that each individual is a historical and social product, a pluralistic bundle of overlapping spheres of foci, a “thick” self. In the first instance there is no self-as- such as a precritical, transcendental cogito. or totally ideal spectator. Self-reflection and self-criticism, what Walzer calls a “thin self,” does develop, but only later out of the thick socialized self. Self-reflection arises when there are inconsistencies, disagreements or clashes between one's interests, commitments, and spheres of value, clashes that jar one into taking another point of view, a point of view that is still one's own. This “thin” self accounts for the unity and continuity of overlapping, changing “thick” selves, it is that of oneself that “perdures” though time and change. The “thin” self, then, is socially derived but not merely socially determined, a self with the ability to choose, manipulate, and even change events, and it explains our ability to get a perspective on our situation and its positive and negative features. (See Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), especially Chapter Five.)

57 Sen, p. 130.

58 Indeed, it is possible within a particular social/cultural/institutional context to develop a limited objectivity so that one has a closed loop of decision-making. To understand what I mean, let us look at an example. The Nestle Corporation produces some of the finest infant formula in the world. They are an international company with an excellent product, good marketing skills, and strong code of ethics. In selling infant formula world-wide Nestle was successful in a number of markets including the Far East. From a rational and impartial point of view it seemed reasonable to take the same product, same marketing skills to the Third World, in particular to Africa. Yet when they went into a new culture, East Africa, they neglected to take into account the context, a context in which most customers cannot read, clean water is an oxymoron, and medicine men are thought of as gods. So when men in white coats promoted infant formula, thousands of illiterate mothers, unable to read the directions and warnings on the label, gave up breast feeding for the powder, overdiluting it with polluted water. What appeared to be reasonable processes failed in this new context, because Nestle did not take into account traditions of African cultures nor the conceptual scheme through which an African mother projects her experiences.

59 Nussbaum, p. 155.

60 Walzer, Thick and Thin, especially Chapter One.

61 See Brink, David, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially pp. 139-143 for a lengthy defense of this conclusion.

62 See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, especially pp. 20,48-51; Norman Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy LXXVI (1979), pp. 256-281 and “On Some Methods of Ethics and Linguistics,” Philosophical Studies 37 (1980), pp. 21-36.

63 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 20.

64 Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 10th Edition, p. 392.

65 See Taub, Richard, Community Capitalism (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988)Google Scholar for a detailed analysis of the South Shore Bank and its development.

66 Nussbaum, op. cit., quoting from Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner, 1934), p. 62.