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The Moral Psychology of Business: Care and Compassion in the Corporation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Robert C. Solomon
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Abstract:

The virtue of moral psychology is that it emphasizes what is most human in business, as opposed to the more bloodless concepts of “obligation,” “duty,” “responsibility” and rights.” The heart of moral psychology is to be found in such concrete phenomena as fear, love, affection, antipathy, loyalty, jealousy, anger, resentment, avarice, ambition, pride, and cowardice. In this essay, I want to explore two of the core virtues of the corporation, conceived of as a community, the “sentiments” of care and compassion. These were taken to be the very core of ethics by Adam Smith. I want to distinguish care and compassion from each other and both from the more principled and rule-bound conceptions of ethics that still dominate philosophy.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 515 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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References

Notes

Portions of this essay have been adapted from my book, Ethics and Excellence, Oxford University Press, 1991, and from my essay, “Competition, Care and Compassion: Toward a Non-Chauvinist View of the Corporation,” in Freeman and Donaldson, eds., The Ruffin Lectures, Oxford University Press, 1998.

1 Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments was published in 1759, his Wealth of Nations in 1776. His friend David Hume shared Smith’s commitment to basic property rights— though he himself was minimally propertied—but wrote relatively little about what could be called the world of business. I have written about Aristotle’s contributions to business ethics elsewhere (Ethics and Excellence, op. cit.). Nietzsche’s potentially profound influence on business ethics—what one might call “Nietzschean management”—has yet to be discussed. I will not attempt to do so here.

2 My first published paper in philosophy—as a graduate student with Richard Brandt several decades ago—was an attack on the then-reigning distinction between “normative and metaethics.” There is no such discipline as metaethics, I argued, only increasing abstract (and noncommittal) versions of ethics. I have not changed my mind about this, as evidenced by my continuing infatuation for Aristotle and Nietzsche.)

3 In the last few years, there has been a very significant literature developing in which the male tendencies toward what I have been calling “chauvinism” and the more feminist (not necessarily “feminine”) virtues of caring and compassion have been quite sharply distinguished along gender (if not sexual) lines. Notably in Carol Gilligan’s A Different Voice (Harvard, 1982), in Cheshire Calhoun, “Justice, Care and Gender Bias,” Journal of Philosophy, and in Nell Noddings, Caring, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). Genevieve Lloyd has similarly argued for the gender origins of the notion of “reason” in her Man of Reason (University of Minnesota, 1984). I find much to admire and share in that literature, but I will have little to say about its

4 Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals (trans. J. Ellington, Hackett, 1981).

5 For example, what Kenneth Goodpaster calls “type 3 management” in his “Ethical Imperatives and Corporate Leadership” in R. Edward Freeman, ed., Business Ethics, the State of the Art, (Oxford, 1991), p. 95f. The Kantian view of responsibility also serves as a presupposition in his “Can a Corporation have a Conscience?” Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb., 1982).

6 See, e.g., Peter A. French, who has argued extensively the position that I would endorse here, notably in his “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” originally published in the American Philosophical Quarterly 1979 (16:3) but more conveniently reprinted in his book, The Spectrum of Responsibility (New York: Saint Martin’s, 1991).

7 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality (trans. Payne, Bobbs-Merrill, 1941). Blum, “Compassion,” in Rorty, ed. Explaining Emotions (University of California Press, 1980). Laurence Thomas, On Being Moral, (Temple University Press, 1989), Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, 1991); Nell Noddings, Caring (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

8 “It was Midge Decter who declared that ‘compassion’ is a term she cannot abide. The pages of The Public Interest are full of articles by young technocrats who may well be able to abide the emotion but who insist that it would cost too much.” Norman Birnbaum, The Nation (April 23, 1988).

9 For example, Edmund Pincoffs, one of the most prominent defenders of virtue ethics, lists over two hundred virtues (in Quandaries and Virtues, p. 76–7). He develops a detailed hierarchy of five categories of “instrumental” and “non-instrumental” virtues and seven sub-categories under “aesthetic,” “meliorating” and “moral” but virtually none of them are emotions or sentiments. (Many virtuous traits, however, concern the control of the emotions [nonvengefulness, serenity, even-temperateness] or having pleasantly sociable passions, [e.g., cheerfulness]. (Esp. p. 85.)

10 I have argued this thesis at greater length in my essay “The Virtue of Love” in French et al., eds., Ethics: Character and Virtue (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XIII, 1989). Reprinted in K. Higgins and R. Solomon, eds., The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1991).

11 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971), p. 3.

12 An excellent recent discussion of the role of empathy in Rawls’s “original position” is Martin L. Hoffman, “Empathetic Emotions and Justice in Society,” in Social Justice Research, III:4, Dec. 1989, pp. 283–311.

13 I have argued this thesis at length in my Passion for Justice (Addison-Wesley, 1990). The literature I am opposing in this, beginning with John Rawls’s monumental Theory of Justice, is voluminous, but what I reject in general (and in qualified terms with regard to Rawls’s own multidimensional theory) is the emphasis on abstract theories and rational choice theory as opposed to concrete human feelings and relationships. A somewhat recent movement, also in revolt against the Rawlsian paradigm, is so-called “communitarianism,” notably in the work of Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge 1982) and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Chapter 18) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (both University of Notre Dame, 1981 and 1988, respectively) although MacIntyre rejects that label.

14 For instance, Nell Noddings and Cheshire Calhoun, op. cit.

15 I have argued this more fully in my Passion for Justice (chapter 6) and in “The Emotions of Justice,” Social Justice Research, III:4, Dec. 1989, pp. 345–374.

16 See, for a good discussion of this, Douglas Walton’s Emotions in Argument (College Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1991).

17 “The man who observes the joy of another will himself experience joy.” Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1957), p. 12.

18 Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments (TMS) I.i.5.

19 Smith, TMS I.i.I.2.

20 Ibid.

21 Patricia Werhane, Ethics and Economics: The Legacy of Adam Smith for Modern Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 1991)

22 Smith, TMS I.i.I 2.

23 Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1957) p. 12.

24 MacIntyre, After Virtue , p. 216.

25 Notably, in Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.)

26 Smith, TMS II,ii,2,1.

27 After Virtue, p. 47; but see also Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 291 and the whole of Chapter XVI.

28 Ibid

29 After Virtue p. 47.

30 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 268.

31 I am indebted to Annette Baier for her work on Hume, since published as A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, 1991) and Patricia Werhane for letting me see the manuscript of her The Legacy of Adam Smith for Modern Capitalism.

32 Henry Mintzberg, “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug., 1975.

33 Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

34 Mencius on the Mind, trans. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1970)

35 Lawrence Blum, op. cit.

36 An added benefit: Norma Feshbach, a child psychologist, claims to have shown that sympathy assures success, that 4th to 5th grade students who have been brought up to be compassionate and understanding tend to do better in school and in their relationships.

37 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV.

38 Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Their Profits.” New York Times, September, 1971.

39 Peter Drucker, Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) p. 320 and 343 ff.

40 Lawrence Blum, ibid.

41 Ibid.