Business Ethics Issues - Essay Example

Running Head: Business Ethics Business Ethics s Business Ethics Individuals in business face several challenges when they move beyond their own country and culture in search of customers and suppliers. One of the most difficult questions is: How do we resolve the conflicts between our home nations civil laws and ethical principles and those of the country in which we are doing business? What, in fact, can we expect other countries views of business ethics to be? For the most part, scholars who are interested in business ethics seem to have split into two camps, talking about two kinds of business ethics--the normative and the empirical. The former is considered to be a prescriptive approach, and the latter an explanatory, descriptive, or predictive approach. Normative business ethics is the domain of philosophers and theologians, while empirical business ethics is considered to be the domain of management consultants and business school professors. Scholars who represent these different domains are said to be guided by different theories, assumptions, and norms which often result in misunderstanding or lack of appreciation for each others endeavors. The normative approach, rooted in philosophy and the liberal arts, focuses its attention on questions of what ought to be, and how an individual or business ought to behave in order to be ethical. The empirical approach, rooted in management and the social sciences, is generally concerned with questions of what is, assuming that the organizational world is basically objective and "out there" awaiting impartial exploration and discovery. Empiricist answer questions of what is by attempting to describe, explain, or predict phenomena in the natural world using the agreed-upon methodologies of their social scientific training. The social scientist may devalue the philosophers moral judgments because these judgments cannot be understood in empirical terms and cannot be verified by empirical testing or be used to predict or explain behavior. The social scientists statements about morality, on the other hand, are seen to be of little value to the philosopher because such statements do not address the essential questions of right and wrong. Normative ethical theories develop standards by which the propriety of certain practices in the business world can be evaluated. In contrast, the empirical approach focuses on identifying definable and measurable factors within the individual psyches and social contexts that influence individual and organizational ethical behavior. (Trevino 1994) Gary Weaver and Linda Tevino have outlined three conceptions of the relationship between normative and empirical business ethics; the first, which they call the parallel relationship, rejects any efforts to link normative and empirical inquiry for both conceptual and practical reasons. The second conception, called the symbiotic relationship, supports a practical relationship in which the two domains may rely on each other for guidance in setting agendas or in applying the results of their conceptually and methodologically distinct inquiries. Information from each type of business ethics inquiry is potentially relevant to the pursuit and application of the other form of inquiry. The third conception, a full-fledged theoretical integration, countenances a deeper merging of distinct forms of inquiry, involving alterations or combinations of theory, assumptions, and methodology--a task the authors believe few people in the field are equipped to even attempt, let alone resolve. (Weaver 1994) B. Victor and C. W. Stephens call for a unification of the two domains, arguing that ignoring the descriptive aspects of moral behavior in a business context is to risk unreal philosophy, and ignoring the normative aspects is to risk amoral social science. (Victor 1994) Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee develop their integrative social contracts theory that incorporates empirical findings as part of a contractarian process of making normative judgments. These two authors seek to put the "ought" and the "is" in symbiotic harmony that requires the cooperation of both empirical and normative research in rendering ultimate value judgments. This split between the two approaches to business ethics is a manifestation of a problem that has existed between philosophy and science for several centuries. This problem is most often expressed as the difference between facts and values, but other ways of stating the problem have also appeared, such as the difference between objective versus subjective approaches, the "is" versus the "ought," and descriptive versus prescriptive statements. This distinction involves questions related to the seriousness with which normative or ought statements should be taken. Are ethical oughts in any way scientific or empirical propositions that say something significant about the world in which we live, or are oughts merely matters of opinion? Do ought claims relate in any significant way to factual claims that are the subject matter of scientific endeavors? The fact-value distinction in a broad sense leads to the view that facts are not action guiding, in the sense of indicating that something ought to be done. Facts are descriptions and causal explanations of human or natural phenomena. Value judgments, on the other hand, do have an action-guiding function and commend or condemn particular courses of action, whether this commendation or condemnation is held to evince subjective feeling or to state an objective standard. Whether subjective or objective, such statements are immune from scientific testing and hence are radically different from scientific claims and beyond factual refutation or verification. This immunity poses a special problem for moral philosophers who want to make normative statements about what business ought to be doing or what it ought not to be doing. How can the validity of these statements be established, and how can they be seen as anything other than mere opinion or dogmatic assertion, which can then be easily dismissed in a scientific, technological culture? The pragmatic understanding of science and scientific method, along with its rethinking of the fact-value distinction, offers a new way of understanding the normative business ethics-empirical business ethics issue. The ensuing discussion will turn first to the pragmatic understanding of scientific method and then to the pragmatic understanding of the fact-value controversy. While these two issues are intertwined, they offer distinct dimensions of the general problematic. Although the issue of the empirical-normative split in business ethics, along with the fact-value split with which it is intertwined, has been a subject of much debate in recent years, what has not been the object of focus so explicitly is the traditional and pervasive understandings of scientific method which seem to both underline and emanate from such a split. The significance of the pragmatic understanding of scientific method has been overlooked precisely because this understanding is assimilated with, and understood in terms of, more traditional approaches. Indeed, in an extensive cataloging of the ontological and epistemological assumptions which underlie diverse research methods in the social sciences--one that may at first glance seem quite exhaustive if positions air taken broadly enough--there is no slot into which the pragmatic position call be placed without grave distortion. This, before turning to it positive analysis of the pragmatic understanding of scientific method, it will be useful to clarify to some extent what this method does not imply. First, scientific method does not imply any particular type of content. Pragmatism arose in part as a reaction against the Modern World View Cartesian understanding of the nature of scientific and of the scientific object. This understanding resulted from the general fact that the method of gaining knowledge which was the backbone of the emergence of modern science was confounded with the content of the first "lasting" modern scientific view--the Newtonian mechanistic universe. Such a confusion, based largely on the presuppositions of a spectator theory of knowledge, led to a naively realistic philosophic interpretation of scientific concern. Scientific knowledge provided the literal description of objective fact and excluded our lived qualitative experience as providing access to the natural universe. Nature as objectified justified nature as an object of value-free human manipulation. This factvalue split gained added support from an entirely different direction with the lengthy entrenchment of logical positivism as the dominant philosophy of science. Moreover, the quantitatively characterized universe, with its alienation of humans and nature and radical dehumanizing of nature, resulted in a mind-matter dualism. In rejecting the passive or spectator theory of knowledge, and the illicit reifications to which it gave rise, pragmatism rejects the philosophic abstractions of Cartesian dualism. The human being, for the pragmatist, is within nature, not outside nature and causally linked to it. For the pragmatist, this human being does not perceive mental contents somehow caused by physical particles; this human does not, through introspection, arrive at something "inside" which had been caused by something "outside." In brief, not only is Cartesian dualism rejected by pragmatism, but also the entire philosophical baggage with which it became linked. Such a rejection, however, when interpreted in the light of the Modern World View Newtonian understanding of nature, can be glibly read as a type of reductionism. If the organism is a part of nature, then it is reducible to nature. The model for understanding this relation to nature, since it is not that of mental contents causally linked to physical particles, must be the behavioristic model of stimulus-response in one of its several versions, or at best some more general-causal account of the origin of knowledge. Although the reductionistic interpretation of pragmatic doctrines has happily and rapidly begun to wane, the focus on causal analysis in one of its several forms as the keystone of naturalism and of scientific method has not. Recent claims that epistemology should be naturalized go hand in hand with a causal theory of justification in terms of causal processes that produce psychological belief-states that are true. Furthermore, this type of analysis is held to be patterned after scientific inquiry and theory construction. Epistemology thereby becomes dependent upon scientific inquiry, and scientific inquiry, like naturalism, centers around doctrines of causal analysis. However, this understanding of scientific method has still not rid itself of the confusion of scientific method with scientific content to which pragmatic naturalism so strongly objects. While claiming to be patterned after the method of scientific inquiry, adherents of this view are in fact using the contents of particular sciences as the materials for attempting either to understand or to build an epistemological theory. Indeed, causal connections are always expressed as relations among particular types of objects or events, and the nature of the events or objects being connected enters into the very understanding of the nature of the causal relationship sustained. This focus on scientific method still not purified of content represents a lingering influence of Modern World View thought and is contrary to the pragmatic focus. References Trevino, Linda K. and Gary R. Weaver , "Business ETHICS/BUSINESS Ethics: One Field or Two?" Business Ethics Quarterly, 4, no. 2 ( 1994), pp. 113-128. Weaver, Gary R. and Linda K. Trevino, "Normative and Empirical Business Ethics: Separation, Marriage of Convenience, or Marriage of Necessity?" Business Quarterly, 4, no. 2 ( 1994), pp. 129-143. Victor, B. and C. W. Stephens, "Business: A Synthesis of Normative Philosophy and Empirical Social Science." Business Ethics Quarterly, 4, no. 2 ( 1994), pp. 145-155. Read More