This article addresses the issue of whether and to what extent moral values can be attributed to collective actors. The paper starts from the premise that business ethics as the ethics of an organization is to be distinguished from the virtues of its members. This point is elaborated in both economic- and organization-theoretic terms within the framework of the New Economics of Organization. The result is the development of a concept of governance ethics. The ethics of governance is about the incorporation of moral conditions and requirements in the management, governance, and control structures of a firm. This is the contextual precondition for the long-lasting and beneficial effects of the virtues of individuals within the organizations.

This article draws on ancient and medieval Jewish texts to explore the role of the physical environment in Jewish thought. It situates Jewish teachings in the context of the debate between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, discusses the Jewish view of nature, and reviews various interpretations of an important Biblical precept of environmental ethics. It argues that while Jewish thought contains many “green” elements, it also contains a number of beliefs that challenge some contemporary environmental values.

The key to the Jewish contribution to environmental ethics lies in the concept of balance—balance between the values and needs of humans and the claims of nature, and between viewing nature as a source of life and moral values and as a threat to human life and social values. The teachings of Judaism challenge both those who would place too low a value on nature as well as those who would place too high a value on it.

Total Quality Management (TQM) has been the object of extensive discussion within the popular literature and is increasingly of interest among management scholars. Recent scholarship has focused on the theoretical foundations of TQM, particularly what makes it work, why so many firms have had problems implementing it, and under what circumstances it may create a sustainable advantage for individual firms. This paper extends the work in theory development regarding TQM and offers an empirically testable theoretical model of its function. The central claim of the paper is that embedded within TQM there are a set of moral values (“value dynamics”) that must be developed and maintained if it is to work, and that seeing them as moral values has significant theoretical and practical implications. That is, how TQM is understood and “enacted” (Weick 1979) by managers plays a significant role in determining its success. The discussion is linked to the ethics literature, normative implications of the model are explored, and directions for future research are outlined.

Phillips and Margolis argue that moral philosophy is a poor basis for business ethics, but their narrow view of moral philosophy would exclude Aristotle, for one. They criticize me for assimilating states and organizations in using the Rawlsian device, but they put too much faith in Rawls’s distinction between states and voluntary organizations and pay too little attention to the continuities between them. Their plea for a conceptually autonomous ethics for organizations I interpret as reasonable and largely compatible with my own stated opinion.

This paper is the presidential address to the Society for Business Ethics presented during its annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on August 7, 1999. The paper discusses three models of management morality and considers their applicability for thinking about business ethics in the new millennium. The moral management model, in particular, is discussed in contrast to the moral market model, which was presented in the previous year’s presidential address by John Boatright. Immoral Management, Moral Management, and Amoral Management are considered and two hypotheses about the presence of amorality within the management population and individual managers are reflected upon.

In his Society for Business Ethics presidential address, “Does business ethics rest on a mistake?” John Boatright argues that we should move away from what he calls the Moral Manager Model of Business Ethics toward a Moral Market Model, in which the focus is not on the individual responsibilities of managers but on the regulation of economic markets to achieve ethical ends. Boatright’s message is a very important one. Market mechanisms and market values increasingly dominate our society, and it is important that business ethicists recognize this and ask how they can contribute to such a society. But this should not mean throwing out or even downplaying the Moral Manager Model. I shall argue here that economic markets are inherently hostile both to regulation and to moral values, and that their beneficence depends critically on the political context of traditional moral values and individual responsibility that the Moral Manager Model supports. Indeed, as we go through a period of commercial and cultural globalization, marked by a combination of rapid economic development and moral uncertainty, the need for moral managers has never been greater.

Boatright begins by identifying three problems with the Moral Manager Model of business ethics. First, to the extent that it describes the desired aims of business ethics, he contends that business ethics is fighting a losing battle. The most admired corporate executives today are not “moral managers” at all but hard-headed and ruthless economic actors. Secondly, its application is effectively restricted to the senior managers of large companies: it does not speak to the situation of the majority of managers and working people. Thirdly, he suggests, most people nowadays are primarily economic actors. In business and in our home lives we act and think as market participants, striving to get the best deal.

While many aspects of stock and option based compensation for corporate officers remain controversial, we suggest that the growing trend for similar practices in favor of boards of directors will prove to be even more contentious. High-ranking corporate managers do not set their own salaries nor authorize their own stock options. By contrast, boards of directors do, in fact, set their own compensation packages. Other potential conflicts of interest include setting option performance targets, stock buybacks, stock option resets and reloads, consolidations (mergers and acquisitions), and service on multiple boards. As trust is the most valuable commodity in a capitalist society, we suggest that these potential conflicts of interest and related outcomes may ultimately serve to erode any anticipated benefits of director stock compensation.

This paper offers an extended critique of the proliferation of talk and writing of business ethics in recent years. Following Levinas, it is argued that the ground of ethics lies in our corporeal sensibility to proximate others. Such moral sensibility, however, is readily blunted by a narcissistic preoccupation with self and securing the perception of self in the eyes of powerful others. Drawing upon a Lacanian account of the formation of the subject, and a Foucaultian account of the workings of disciplinary power, it is then argued that the governance of the corporation is effected precisely through encouraging such a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. For the most part our narcissistic concerns are bound to ethically indifferent financial interests. But in recent years they have also been harnessed to the demand for environmental, social and ethical responsibility by the corporation. It is argued, however, that the desire to be seen to be ethical—the ethics of narcissus—is the obverse of “being responsible for.”

Can we achieve greater fairness by reforming the corporation? Some recent progressive critics of the corporation argue that we can achieve greater social justice both inside and outside the corporation by simply rewriting or reinterpreting corporate rules to favor non-stockholders over stockholders. But the progressive program for reforming the corporation rests on a critical assumption, which I challenge in this essay, namely that the rules of the corporation matter, so that changing them can effect a lasting redistribution of wealth from stockholders to non-stockholders. This essay uses a critique of the progressive reform program to argue that the rules of the corporation are distributively neutral. The corporation isn’t rigged against non-stockholders, and changing its rules will not improve the bargaining power of non-stockholders. However, while the rules may be epiphenomenal from the standpoint of distributive justice, they can have substantial impacts on the corporation’s efficiency. As a result, the proposed reforms may hurt the corporation’s capacity to generate benefits for all the parties concerned.

To achieve ethical corporate governance, directors’ first priority must be to examine their own structure and operation. If the board is vulnerable to charges of unethical conduct, it will have little credibility in its oversight role over the corporate culture of the organization. An examination of a positive model of corporate governance in the mutual fund industry provides an effective illustration of several ways to add ethics to corporate governance: 1) legislation; 2) jawboning; 3) peer pressure; 4) regulation; 5) training and reflection. While peer pressure and training are more effective than the others, all those methods taken together cannot solve every ethical lapse. Only individual board members, working together, can influence the conduct of the board and propel themselves and the organization towards a standard of continuing ethical excellence.