Moral Disagreements in Business: An Exploratory Introduction

Springer Verlag (2018)
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Abstract

This book disassembles the moral assessment of business practices into its constituent parts to identify and clarify the four key concepts that form the basis of important moral disagreements in business: ‘personhood,’ ‘ownership,’ ‘harm,’ and ‘consent.’ ‘Moral bottom lines’ are those fundamental concepts in business ethics that ultimately account for our most resilient moral claims and unsurpassable convictions, and exploring them provides essential insights into the grounds on which we disagree in business ethics. This analysis is useful for students in business school looking to understand fundamental moral disagreements in business and for practitioners interested in connecting practice with their own moral intuitions. The book also challenges scholars of business ethics by arguing that we can reduce business ethics disagreements to these four issues. "This is the most refreshing book on business ethics to appear in a long time. By focusing on 'personhood,' 'ownership,' 'harm,' and 'consent,' Eabrasu brings a new level of clarity and insight into disagreements on business ethic issues. Rather than reaching for an artificial utopian resolution, he embraces the challenge of explaining why we disagree. This is a must-read for serious business ethic scholars."Nicolas CapaldiLoyola University New OrleansLegendre-Soulé Distinguished Chair in Business Ethics.

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Chapters

Conclusion: Let’s Start From Four

In the opening scene of the Italian movie Ricomincio da tre , Massimo Troisi abruptly says, ‘I want to leave everything behind and start from three!’ Lello Arena retorts in response, correcting his statement: ‘From zero. The habitual formula is: “I start from zero” not “from three.”’ Incredulous, Tr... see more

Harm and Consent

‘Consent’ is the cornerstone of morality in general, and more particularly of assessing the morality of business practices, given that they are defined as contractual. Consent is a key moral bottom line because it allows us to tell apart wrongful from morally acceptable interactions. Consent among p... see more

Ownership

Disagreements on moral personhood do not entirely exhaust the moral issues in business, and an important aspect of these relates to disagreements over interpretations of ‘ownership.’ Can—and should—a firm own the air, water, body parts, an idea, a font, or a color? The answers to these questions dep... see more

Personhood

The criteria we use to define a person are not irrelevant, and the point where we set the frontier of personhood is of crucial importance in determining the limits of interactions with others. This frontier determines whether our interactions are moral or merely technical. In a nutshell, harming som... see more

Moral Bottom Lines

As outlined in the introduction, business opportunities and moral choices are often intertwined. Managerial decisions have financial and legal constraints; they also have to take moral issues into account. While it is difficult to say precisely what these constraints are and the order of priority in... see more

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main argument: there are different and dissenting moral interpretations of business cases. The underlying theme of this book is examining the connections between moral philosophy and business practice. Recognizing these connections is stimulating, especi... see more

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Citations of this work

Cheating in Business: A Metaethical Perspective.Marian Eabrasu - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 162 (3):519-532.
Moral Disagreements in Business.Paul Griseri - 2020 - Philosophy of Management 19 (2):223-227.

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