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Traversing the Inferno: A New Direction for Business Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Daryl Koehn
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Abstract:

The discipline of business ethics traditionally has paid too much attention to articulating and applying the moral law and has devoted too little thinking to the nature and consequences of evil for our souls. For purposes of this discussion, I shall limit myself to Dante’s vision of evil as a diminution of human being. On his journey through hell, Dante encounters the shades—people who, through their own actions, have rendered themselves less than fully human. This paper concentrates especially on the various types of fraud and their psychic effects as portrayed by Dante in his book Inferno.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 255 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2000

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References

1 All references to Dante’s Inferno are to Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: Noonday Press, 1996).

2 No doubt many seducers and panderers use flattering speech. Still, the two sins are conceptually distinct. A panderer might tell a victim an outright lie or threaten him or her in order to force compliance with the panderer’s will. Flattery need not be involved.

3 Dante and Virgil have been traversing the circles of fraud by means of a spanning bridge. The bridge over the barrators does not connect with the next circle. Consequently, Dante and Virgil are forced to spend more time with the Malebranche than they may have liked. The whole time they look upon the barrators, they are “accompanied” by (in reality, pursued by) the Malebranche. This arduous encounter with the barrators and Malebranche beautifully symbolizes Dante’s personal experience of being flung into the pitch by those who accused him of selling offices. He gets no help or insights from those in the pitch. He needs the help of the clear-sighted Virgil to overcome his rage and to find his way forward.

4 Although it sounds paradoxical to speak of the living dead, these shades are continuing to act out the same neurotic patterns of behavior they exhibited on earth. Their lives are the punishment for these dead. As Dante suggests in later books, many of those still moving about on the face of the earth are actually “dead” insofar as they are incapable of advancing in self-awareness and self-understanding.