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In Search of Experts: A Conception of Expertise for Business Ethics Consultation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Andrew C. Wicks  and
Paul L. Glezen
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Abstract:

This paper explores the subject of ethics expertise. We suggest that this is a topic which has been badly neglected despite ongoing discussions about subjects which presuppose a particular conception of expertise (e.g., codes of conduct, certification requirements). In addition, given significant challenges to any conception of ethical expertise, we try to determine whether it is possible to provide a meaningful and substantive account of it. The paper moves from more abstract discussion of the idea to grounding a particular model, providing substance to it, and discussing specific traits or qualities of ethics experts.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1998 , pp. 105 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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Footnotes

1

We would like to thank several people for their helpful comments and insights relevant to this paper including R. Edward Freeman, Norm Bowie, Jim Gaa, Martin Calkins, Robert Phillips, Tara Radin, and Joel Reichart.

References

Notes

2 The only two papers on the subject in business ethics are by Jim Gaa [“The Auditor’s Role: The Philosophy and Psychology of Independence and Objectivity.” Proceedings of the 1992 Deloitte & Touche University of Kansas Symposium on Auditing Problems (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1993): 7-43; Gaa, J. and Ponemon, L. “Toward a Theory of Moral Expertise: A Verbal Protocol Study of Public Accounting Professionals.” Working paper.] and John Dienhart [“Rationality, Ethical Codes, and an Egalitarian Justification for Ethical Expertise.” Business Ethics Quarterly, 5 (1995)]. While both make important (and very different) contributions to understanding the topic, neither paper is devoted exclusively to the subject of expertise. We will indicate below why further discussion is needed.

3 This was one of the featured panel discussions at the 1993 SBE meeting in Atlanta, Ga. It also led to the creation of a group within the SBE to research and study these issues and propose recommendations to the group.

4 This subject was not explicitly addressed in the comments of the speakers on the SBE panel.

5 Levin, M. “Ethics Courses: Useless.” The New York Times. November 25, 1990.

6 Bennett, W. “Getting Ethics.” Commentary (December 1980): 62-5; Greenfield, M. “Right and Wrong in Washington.” Newsweek. February 13, 1995: 88. Noble, C. “Ethics and Experts.” Hastings Center Report 12(1982): 7-9; and Schofield, G. “Here Come the Ethicists.” Trends in Health Care, Law & Ethics. 8(1993): 19-22.

7 This is a variation of an objection raised by Miller, F. “Do Moral Experts Exist?”. The Hastings Center Report (August 1984): 50.

8 Schofield, G. “Here Come the Ethicists.” (1993); Yeo, M. “Prolegomena to Any Future Code of Ethics for Bioethicists.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2(1993): 402-15.

9 See Freeman, “The Politics of Stakeholder Theory.” Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (1994) especially for discussion of this term as well as Wicks “Overcoming the Separation Thesis: The Need for a Reconsideration of SIM Research” in Business and Society 1 (1996): 89-118.

10 It may be the case that there is a relevant conception of “business” expertise which encompasses the moral dimension of business, but this is decidedly different than moral expertise and would lead us to expect different training, skills, and achievements.

11 Caplan, (1988): 77; Baylis, F. “Persons with Moral Expertise and Moral Experts” in Hoffmaster, B. and Freeman, B. (ed.) Clinical Ethics: Theory and Practice (Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1989): 89.

12 See Dienhart, J. (1993): 419-50

13 Dienhart claims that the definitive skills can be defined in such a way as to render them compatible with any moral or epistemological tradition. For purposes of argument we have not challenged this claim. Note, however that even granting such agreement about a conception of rationality is giving a great deal. Dienhart offers some reasons to prefer a non-classical view of rationality (which is tied to particular traditions), but these are far from a justification of it, nor do they speak to the array of challenges that writers like MacIntyre, Walzer, and others would bring to this conceptualization of the problem.

14 Despite this flaw, as we see it, the position Dienhart lays out in his paper is useful. It has illuminated many of the important nuances of this issue, particularly in giving some sense to the ideas that ethics experts could be “wrong” or give bad advice (if their conclusions were poorly reasoned).

15 Notice that with Dienhart’s account the problem of choosing among various conceptions of moral expertise remains. He shows how one could develop the non-classical sense of rationality to accord with egalitarian values, but one could well “plug in” an array of other value systems and face the prospect of having to choose or justify one for use. Dienhart’s account does not provide a mechanism to address or resolve this conceptual question, which this paper maintains is central to the question of moral expertise.

16 That is, moral problems get specified relative to particular moral traditions.

17 Rawls, J. “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7(1987).

18 Rawls, J. (1987): 4.

19 Rawls, J. (1993); Rorty, R. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Stout, J. Ethics After Babel. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988; Walzer, M. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

20 Rawls, J. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 (pp. 125-6).

21 Here is another place where our account differs from Dienhart. He assumes a fairly strong degree of uniformity about the content (knowing the moral traditions of the West) and posture (egalitarian) of ethics experts. While our model will have elements of this, he does not indicate why this posture is to be preferred, nor how it would deal with the plurality of traditions within even an egalitarian society (e.g., the U.S.). There is the risk that one might perceive the egalitarian notion of expertise as the right one, just as people saw Rawls’s A Theory of Justice as an overarching conception of the right which would constrain the account of the good from any particular tradition. By complicating the problem of expertise, our approach explicitly acknowledges and addresses this problem and makes room for an array of legitimate notions of expertise.

22 Rawls, (1987): 2, 21.

23 Rawls, ibid., pp. 3-4; and “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14(1985): 225.

24 Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” (1991): 175.

25 Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.” Philosophy and Public Affairs. (Fall 1988): 265. Here he is referring to Berlin’s views.

26 This is closer to the kind of claim one could make in using Rawls’s original A Theory of Justice, at least if one saw it—as his critics did—providing a basis for a comprehensive moral doctrine that could provide impartial constraints on any account of the good.

27 Dienhart’s discussion of moral expertise within our society seems to presuppose that the notion of expertise found within our liberal political order would be the conception for us, providing no room for other legitimate candidates. We see this as too strong and unnecessarily limiting a claim.

28 This is a common theme in discussions of professions. See, for instance, Greenwood, E. “Attributes of a Profession” in B. Baumrin and B. Freedman (eds.), Moral Responsibility and the Professions (New York: Haven, 1983); and Kultgen, J. Ethics and Professionalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. As explicitly stated within the professions (and to a lesser extent within the nonprofessions where clients put their trust in “experts”), business ethics consultation would appear to engender responsibilities to foster not only the well-being of clients, but the larger social good.

29 Donaldson, T and Dunfee, T. “Integrative Social Contracts Theory: A Communitarian Conception of Economic Ethics.” Economics and Philosophy 11:1(1995): 85-112.

30 Indeed, R. Edward Freeman has taken just this position in his unpublished manuscript “Managing in a Global Economy: From Relativism to Multiculturalism.”

31 Rorty, (1991); Rawls, (1987).

32 Rawls, (1987); Beauchamp, T. and Childress, J. (1989).

33 Though the concept is widely discussed in forms of democratic theory in political science and political philosophy, the specific terminology we adopt here is similar to that found in Hardin, G. “The Tragedy of The Commons.” Science 162 (December 1968): 1243-8.

34 For discussions of this in the context of business ethics see Freeman, R. E. and Gilbert, D. R., Jr. Corporate Strategy and The Search for Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988. See also Rawls (1988) for a discussion of the importance of political community and communal life in a liberal society.

35 There is still room for charges of incompetence or failure to provide either adequate or appropriate services, but these are quite different matters. For insight into how we might determine whether one got a “bad” consultation, see the criteria below in the next section.

36 This position is in conflict with the model embraced by Robert Veatch in an essay in Hoffmeister and Freedman (1989).

37 Freeman, E. (1994).

38 To illustrate this, see Dienhart’s paper (1995), especially his use of the language of ethics as “applied” to business and the idea that ethical expertise is most applicable to “borderline cases”/dilemmas. The former notion has been identified as problematic by both Freeman (1994) and Wicks (1996). The latter notion also appears to reinforce the separation thesis, since it implies that ethics is primarily about dilemmas and conflicts where the ethics stuff “sticks out” or is largely detachable from the business part, and doesn’t have much to do with the activities of business.

39 We borrow this metaphor from Lynn Sharp Paine from her talk at the 1995 SBE conference in Vancouver, B.C. The notion of ethics as about means and ends is parallel, but this image seemed more powerful for thinking about how ethics and business are interrelated.

40 We use this contrast for rough illustrative purposes, not as a literal metaphor—particularly because we see the two issues (brakes and driving mechanism; means and ends) as linked.

41 The emphasis in Dienhart’s paper (1995) on the value added of ethics experts appears to fit with the Separation Thesis view which Freeman rejects where ethics are expert “problem-solvers”. See p. 439 where he says “…it is precisely in these gray or borderline cases where we would expect to find ethical experts doing their work.”

42 See Werhane (1994).

43 This is the kind of work done by Freeman and Gilbert (1988); Solomon, R. Ethics and Excellence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; and Wicks, A., Gilbert, D, and Freeman, R. “A Feminist Reinterpretation of The Stakeholder Concept.” Business Ethics Quarterly 4(1994): 475-98. It also has affinities with the pragmatism of Rorty, R. (1991) and the “strong poet” in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

44 Lynn Paine’s examples (1994) of firm’s developing integrity strategies indicates that this kind of activity does not require a doctorate in ethics, although her framework is surely helpful for firms which undertake such an effort. See Paine, L. S. “Managing for Organizational Integrity.” Harvard Business Review 2 (1994): 106-17.

45 In her Ruffin Lecture, Patricia Werhane discusses this phenomena using a number of prominent business ethics cases where people in business essentially work from a script where many moral problems remain invisible—that is, they become so enmeshed in a particular context and set of imperatives such that it is extremely difficult to see basic ethical dilemmas. She refers specifically to the experiences of Dennis Gioia at Ford (he was the Recall Coordinator for the Pinto and chose not to recommend its recall) and Joseph Jett at Kidder, Peabody & Co. (accused of fraudulent trading totaling over $350 million) as examples of this incapacity. For a more complete discussion, see Patricia Werhane’s Lecture entitled “Moral Imagination and The Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management” (part of the 1994 Ruffin Lectures at the Darden School). Her lecture will be published as part of the Ruffin series by Oxford University Press. Baylis (1988) also briefly discusses this concept.

46 This has been a source of ongoing discussion in bioethics leading to the development of a distinct subset of inquiry called clinical ethics, which focuses more on the ethics done at the bedside. For discussions of the issues, see the volume by Fletcher, J., Quist, N. and Jonsen, A. Ethics Consultation in Health Care. Ann Arbor: Health Administration Press, 1989. See especially the essay by Rothenberg, L. S. “Clinical Ethicists and Hospital Ethics Consultants: The Nature of the ‘Clinical’ Role.” See also Ruddick, W. and Finn, W. “Objections to Hospital Philosophers.” Journal of Medical Ethics 11 (1985): 42-6; Fletcher, J. “Who Should Teach Medical Ethics?”. The Teaching of Medical Ethics. Edited by Veatch, R., Gaylin, W. and Morgan, C. (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: The Hastings Center, 1973): 166-72; and Veatch, R. and Sollitto, S. “Medical Ethics Teaching.” Journal of the American Medical Association 235 (1976): 1030-3.

47 Caplan, (1989).

48 William Buckley even suggested that the infected population be tattooed to ensure that anyone who might have contact with them would be informed of their status. See Buckley, W., Jr. “Crucial Steps in Combating the AIDS Epidemic: Identify All the Carriers.” New York Times (March 18, 1986).

49 See Jonsen, A. and Toulmin, S. The Abuse of Casuistry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

50 Baylis, (1989): 96-7.

51 See the various citations listed in the introduction for examples of this.

52 Caplan, (1989).

53 There are similar bodies in law and most other professions. This provides one of the compelling arguments for ethicists developing their own (quasi) profession.

54 This commission had the official title of: The President’s Commission for The Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research.

55 Ackerman makes the concept of social consensus central to his understanding of moral expertise, arguing that it is the capacity to generate “shared and stable commitments among the community” which defines good ethics. While we would agree that consistency with certain broad social values is important, this condition is less important for business ethicists given the contrasts between medicine and business listed above. See his article, “Moral Problems, Moral Inquiry, and Consultation in Clinical Ethics,” in Hoffmaster and Freedman (1989).