Like COVID-19, new infectious disease outbreaks emerge almost annually, and studies predict that this trend will continue due to a variety of factors, including an aging population, ease of travel, and globalization of the economy. In response to episodic public health crises, governments and organizations develop, implement, and enforce policies, procedures, protocols, and programs. The epidemiological triad is both a model of disease causation and fundamentally used to design and deploy such control measures. Here we adapt this model to the workplace setting and use the epidemiological triad to characterize the related ethical challenges in implementing the control measures employers face as a guide for a workplace intervention framework. Through this approach, our aim is to show how an integrated ethical framework, grounded in epidemiological principles, has important implications for how we categorize, understand, and resolve the difficult decisions that emerge in the workplace under pandemic conditions.

In The Moral Dimension, Amitai Etzioni critiques the neoclassical economic paradigm (NEP), a model built upon ethical egoism and which equates rationality (the logical/empirical domain) with the maximization of preferences by self-interested economic units. Etzioni finds the NEP’s exclusion of the moral/affective domain to be a glaring failure and, because of this omission, he claims that the economic model is not capable of achieving its design functions: prediction and explanation. Etzioni introduces a socio-economic model, the I & We paradigm, in which the moral/affective encapsulates the logical/empirical. Further elaboration and testing of this model remains to be undertaken. We find it to hold more promise than its neoclassical economic rival, and we explicate its value for the modern manager.

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.

Rights, justice, and power raise many interesting questions. Why do such basic concepts as rights and justice have such different points of concern—equality, proportionality, medium rei (moderation or the middle of the thing itself without reference to the person using it)? Why are there such different perspectives in philosophy, theology, and law? Why is the notion of power in business ethics so isolated from the general discussion of applied justice in treatises on business contracts, employee relations, and in other related topics? Discussions of power seemed parallel with discussions of justice. The two did not seem to intersect.

In this paper I shall argue that rights, power, and justice are interrelated. While natural rights are the basis for justice, rights cannot be realized nor justice become operative without power. I shall call this relationship and the theory underlying it “Transforming Justice.” One of the basic concerns of this article is to notice the lack of interaction between rights and power in the traditional theories of justice. Granted that for many philosophers it is sufficient to determine what is just. But the notion of justice as an active virtue that persons are to exercise in their dealings with others goes further. It touches the realities of life that every person experiences. Life does not separate rights from power. Reflection upon the current separation of rights from power both in theory and in action is analogous to the separation of the “sensory” from the “imaginative” in art and in life. The urge to devise a framework of justice that brings out the wholeness of its existential being is the underlying rationale for developing a theory of transforming justice. Another purpose for developing a theory of transforming justice is to suggest a conceptual framework of business ethics and corporate social responsibility that incorporates values, rights, power, and virtue. Authors and teachers approach these issues either from a value (or rights/justice) perspective or from the view that institutions respond only to those who exercise power (apart from legitimate claims). Thus, it is necessary for a conceptual framework to incorporate the dynamics of power and the qualifying aspects of rights or claims. A natural law approach to justice and rights argues that humans have certain basic rights that others, whether humans or institutions (regardless of source), are required to respect. Natural rights theory places the burden or duty on each individual to respect the rights of every other person. In addition, justice is usually defined by natural law theorists as “giving each person his or her due,” what is required by natural rights, what is owed, earned, or deserved. But its applications fall short of reality. It raises other questions. How does one person get another to give him what is “his due”? How are duties and claims entailed by natural rights enforced in practice? The notion of transforming justice attempts to answer these questions.

If one disregards the several petty, and often blatantly unfair, complaints voiced by Dr. Ellen Klein, she raises an issue that is worth considering: Who is qualified to teach business ethics? Her answer is plain and straightforward: only philosophers need apply.

This paper contends that rationality is more properly evaluated as a property of an organization’s relationships with its stakeholders than of the organization itself. We predicate our approach on the observation that stakeholders can hold goals quite distinct from those of owners and top managers, and these too can be rationally pursued. We build upon stakeholder theory and Weber’s classic distinction between wertrationalitat and zweckrationalitat, adding to them the “new institutionalist” concept of the organization field (1983, 1991). Stakeholders employ a variety of direct and indirect mechanisms to rationalize relations with the firm. We discuss four: internal subunits, legislated stakeholder participation, legislated access to information, and direct stakeholder activism. These developments are blurring the distinction between the environment and the organization by importing the values and goals of external stakeholders into the internal organization. They are also precipitating a more structured set of relationships among the actors who comprise the field. To the extent that the zweckrationalitat values of managers and owners as well as the wertrationalitat concerns of stakeholders are met, the firm is more rational.

The author argues that a continuing effort to avoid self-deception is the pre-requisite to any ethical analysis; that this effort cannot be altogether successful; that it is likely to even be dysfunctional in a variety of organizational contexts, perhaps particularly in the context of corporate middle management, but that it ought not therefore be ignored. It is contended that business ethicists should be committed to making the difficulties associated with self-scrutiny explicit. Finally, it is argued that in order to do that legitimately for the corporation, university based business ethicists must be willing to face up to parallel difficulties in the university generally and in the school of business in particular.

1 Here’s a way to think about poverty. People who live in poverty do so because they have few opportunities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In fact the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent times due to the more wholesale adoption of capitalist practices around the world. The institutions of business and government conspire to give the poor a Hobson’s choice of minimal wage McJobs or unemployment. Neglect of both urban ghettoes and the rural poor has been systematic, if not conscious. The very idea of capitalism reinforces the notion that some are meant to be poor and some are meant to be rich. Such a system must be overridden at times by government to help the poor cope with their lot. The only solution is a massive redistribution of income and a system of capitalism that is severely restrained. All of this is at best highly unlikely. Even if there were such a redistribution policy we could not count on government to execute it fairly.

This special issue of BEQ presents diverse reflections on business practice from within Western patterns of theology and piety. Our goal is to help both academics and business practitioners understand the ultimate contexts in which religiously minded individuals construe their participation in business, and what these contexts then mean for moral reasoning. To keep the project manageable in scope, we have limited this foray to Western traditions, soliciting views from within representative denominations or viewpoints in Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. If this sampling is well-received, essays representing other traditions—Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism—will be sought for a later issue.

We solicited essays from nine distinct perspectives, so as to present a cross-section of religious views. One of the questions we asked our contributors was: If a person in business were to take your tradition seriously, what does it teach him or her about God’s will for how business ought to be conducted? Here we were amply rewarded in our search for diversity. The nine contributions express a wide variety of religious beliefs and dispositions: from the fervent piety of evangelicals to the moral passion of modern Judaism, from the strict rules of traditional Judaism for containing greed to the exuberant permissions to innovate afforded by Roman Catholic social teaching, from a Lutheran focus on anxiety about security to an African-American struggle with an onerous historical legacy. (An even greater diversity is represented in the enormous recent anthology, On Moral Business, reviewed at the end of this issue.) The essays forcefully point to the importance of the quest to relate faith to business practice. They provide direction for those seeking to reconnect with their traditions. And to interested observers, they provide copious data for imagining how persons adhering to these traditions might interpret the business environment in which they work.

Over the last two decades, institutional investing has rocked the world of corporate governance in a transformation that has begun to be reflected in the finance, legal, and management literatures. Traditional players have seen their roles change and bases of power shift, and new actors have entered the governance equation. These transitions have entailed an ethical upheaval that is only beginning to be addressed in the business ethics literature.

This paper attempts to facilitate research in this area by integrating various literatures into an examination of a series of business ethics issues related to pension fund activism and portfolio management, fund staffing, and employee compensation. The primary intent of this project is to encourage increased business ethics research in the area of institutional investing in general and pension fund management in particular.

Dees and Cramton have argued that we should take a deontological stand to make negotiations more ethical (“Promoting Honesty in Negotiation: An Exercise in Practical Ethics” BEQ, Vol. 3, #3). I suggest that their analysis is overdetermined, and that one can, in fact, reach the same conclusions through a Hobbesian approach to negotiation. I suggest that an equally valid way to develop ethical negotiation is through the consequentialist “Harmony Thesis” which posits that moral behavior is coextensive with beneficial results.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore as wily as serpents and harmless as doves

The economic and political arguments for the market principle over alternative forms of economic organization are to my mind irrefutable. It is on the moral level that the perplexing concerns about capitalism center, concerns that have been raised from the beginnings of the industrial era down to the present time. This essay focuses on one major aspect of the ongoing moral test of capitalism: the test of whether our major corporations can both succeed in their profit-making efforts and also serve as one of society’s chief mediating structures that stand, like family, church and community, between the individual and the state. Should the corporation serve not simply as a utilitarian arrangement for the efficient production of high quality goods and services, but also as a moral community that shapes human character and behavior? How can it do so in this age of brutal markets?

James Q. Wilson, professor of management at UCLA, has no doubt about the answer. In an article last year, he said: “The problem of imbuing large-scale enterprise with a decent moral life is fundamental.” Corporations “are systems of human action that cannot for long command the loyalty of their members if their standards of collective action are materially lower than those of their individual members.” Capitalists should recognize, he concluded, “that, while free markets will ruthlessly eliminate inefficient firms, the moral sentiments of man will only gradually and uncertainly penalize immoral ones. But, while the quick destruction of inefficient corporations threatens only individual firms, the slow anger at immoral ones threatens capitalism, and thus freedom itself.”

Business myth is generally treated in business ethics literature as a mental obstacle that must be removed in order to prepare the ground for rational thinking on the ethical aspect of business conduct. This approach, which focuses on the content of myth, does not explicate the nature and function of myth. Based on the study of myth in the fields of humanities and social sciences, this paper develops a theoretical framework and analytical tool—the revolving-door model—for researching myth in business. The proposed framework (1) offers new perspectives on myth: the consumer’s, the producer’s, the mythologist’s, and the ethicist’s; (2) explicates various distortion mechanisms of the myth; and (3) enables a redefinition of the relation of business myth to business ethics. The applicability of this framework is demonstrated by means of a real case which sets the stage for examining a set of common myths.

Organized immaturity refers to the capacity of widely institutionalized sociotechnical systems to challenge qualities of human enlightenment, autonomy, and self-determination. In the context of surveillance capitalism, where these qualities are continuously put at risk, data transparency is increasingly proposed as a means of restoring human maturity by allowing individuals insight and choice vis-à-vis corporate data processing. In this article, however, I draw on research on General Data Protection Regulation–mandated data transparency practices to argue that transparency—while potentially fostering maturity—itself risks producing new forms of organized immaturity by facilitating user ignorance, manipulation, and loss of control of personal data. Considering data transparency’s relative “successes” and “failures” regarding the cultivation of maturity, I outline a set of possible remedies while arguing for a general need to develop more sophisticated ethical appreciations of transparency’s complex and potentially problematic implications for organized (im)maturity in the digital age.

A common moral argument is that shareholders have a special status because of risk when considering the duties of corporate management. The privileges of this status usually include the idea that management should adopt the goal of maximizing shareholder wealth. We argue that modern financial theory demonstrates that this argument should be modified by the recognition of a principle of desert, the shareholder desert principle (SDP). Financial theory can usefully circumscribe the duty owed to shareholders and the extent to which risk bearing justifies a claim on corporate value. When combined with the SDP, the result provides management with a guideline for what is owed to shareholders before other stakeholder non-contractual claims may be satisfied. As such, our approach provides management with some guidance through the thicket of competing stakeholder claims.