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Is business ethics philosophy

or sophism?
Christopher Michaelson
Preface
A natural response to the question posed by my
title is that business ethics is neither philosophy
nor sophism. This response seems empirically justi-
fiable, for many (if not most) business ethicists are
non-philosophers, and surely among those there
are non-sophists. My purpose here is not to enter
the debate on whether or not the business ethicist
must be a philosopher. To some degree I am using
the term `philosophy' here as an honorific; it is
difficult to regard ``sophism'' as anything but an
insult. In this sense, business ethics does not have
to be a formal academic discipline belonging to
philosophy to be philosophy; it only has to be
philosophically sound, or in other words, consist-
ent with my (old-fashioned? non-technical?) usage
of the word, which will emerge as I proceed.
Introduction
The contrast between the philosopher and the
sophist is subtle and significant. Athenian philos-
ophers and sophists both claimed to teach some-
thing; in the catalog of Platonic dialogues,
sophists claim to possess knowledge about love,
courage, virtue, and other things worth knowing,
some making a rather healthy living by sharing
that `knowledge'. The philosopher Socrates, by
contrast, may not have achieved financial success
by sharing his wisdom,
1
yet by most accounts this
founder of street corner philosophy was an intel-
lectually wealthier man than were those whose
ignorance he sought to expose. However, the sig-
nificant difference between the philosopher and
the sophist has little to do with their respective
financial conditions.
2
Rather, the significant dif-
ference is identified by Socrates himself when he
claims, in the Apology 21d, to be the wisest man
in Athens: ``Neither of us has any knowledge to
boast of, but he thinks that he knows something
which he does not know, whereas I am quite
conscious of my ignorance.''
Nearly two and one half millennia later, busi-
ness ethics has transported street corner conver-
sation into the meeting room and board room,
where ethical leadership is cultivated or stifled.
Are these conversations about ethics philosophy,
or are they sophism? In this paper, I will evaluate
the philosophical soundness of business ethics as
it is practiced in business situations. Although by
no means should all business ethicists be philos-
ophers, business ethicists and philosophers have
wisdom to impart to one another. My objective
here will be to outline the unfulfilled value of
philosophical wisdom to ensuring the value of
business ethics, and business, to society at large.
Moral decision-makingand business
ethics
Whether philosophers or sophists, business ethi-
cists are business people. Thus, the existence of
business ethicists in the business world whether
those practitioners are academic or business
consultants selling such programs, or end users
buying or using them is in part attributable to
market forces. In the relatively mature business
ethics market in the United States, government
action has been a primary driver behind the
Business Ethics: AEuropean Review
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 331
creation of a market for business ethics.
3
The
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act formalized prohi-
bitions on U.S. companies bribing foreign public
officials about twenty years before the Organiz-
ation for Economic Cooperation and Development
succeeded in forming a convention of nations
agreeing to enact similar legislation. Representa-
tives of the U.S. defense contracting industry
coalesced to develop guidelines for the develop-
ment of ethics programs in the 1980s, following
federal investigations of industry business prac-
tices. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines for
Organizations of 1991 created incentives, in the
form of the potential for reduced financial
culpability in the event of criminal employee
behavior, for organizations with `effective' ethics
programs.
4
European business ethics initiatives tend to be
more stakeholder-driven than American pro-
grams, and there is no question but that the
ethical motivation of ethical activities has an
impact on the effectiveness of those activities.
Even so, it is possible to generalize about the
operational components that business ethics pro-
grams often share. In the current market, a
standard organizational ethics program generally
consists of an organizational code of conduct
(enumerating key principles and policies to guide
employee and corporate-wide behavior), training
and communication programs (educating employ-
ees about standards of conduct), and various
auditable mechanisms for setting, monitoring, and
enforcing those standards.
5
(i) Codes of conduct
Codes of conduct are generally considered to be
the `anchor' of ethics programs, although they
obviously require substantial programmatic sup-
port in order to be effective. In fact, in the United
States, a code responds specifically to the Federal
Sentencing Guidelines requirement to `establish
compliance standards and procedures to be fol-
lowed by [the company's] employees and other
agents'. Typically, these codes are introduced with
a letter from senior management proclaiming the
importance of ethical behavior in statements such
as the following:
& ``Over the years employees at every level have
endeavored to build [Company]'s reputation by
fair and honest dealing in every business trans-
action and relationship.''
6
&
``Our commitment to integrity is, I believe, the
`glue' for all of our shared values . . . What does
this mean for each of us? This means that we
are honest and ethical in all our business
practices, and that we obey the letter and spirit
of the laws which apply to our business.''
& ``Acting with integrity and the highest ethical
standards is not only good policy, it is also
good business. Every [Company] employee and
shareowner relies upon you to do the right
thing.''
&
``We must continuously strive for the highest
levels of integrity and trust.''
These introductory statements are generally fol-
lowed by policies on legal and ethical issues
ranging from antitrust to workplace violence:
these usually contain information on what em-
ployees cannot do (for example, own a materially
significant number of shares in a competitor), and
what they can or ought to do (for example, devote
a specified number of hours to organization-
sponsored philanthropic initiatives on company
time).
(ii) Trainingand communication
Recognizing that it is not possible to anticipate
and enumerate every policy and prohibition on
employee behavior necessary to fulfill the com-
pany's vision of what is ethical, ethics programs
generally rely on some form of education to
promote ethical decision-making. One common
training practice is to introduce a `decision-
making model,' in conformity with which employ-
ees evaluate case study-based ethical dilemmas.
The sequence of recommended steps may be as
follows.
1. Evaluate information.
2. Consider how your decision might affect
stakeholders.
3. Consider what ethical values are relevant to the
situation.
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# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 332
4. Determine the best course of action that takes
into account relevant values and stakeholders'
interests.
And:
1. Define the problem.
2. Consider the impact.
3. Review guidelines and consult resources.
4. Brainstorm alternatives.
5. Make a decision.
6. Review.
And finally, reflect on the following:
&
Have I looked at the problem from the per-
spective of all the affected parties?
&
Who will be harmed and who will be helped?
&
Can I discuss the problem with the affected
parties before the decision is made?
&
What alternative courses of action do I have?
&
Which outcomes are consistent with my values
and duties?
& Would I be willing to disclose the decision to
my boss, the CEO, the board, my family?
& If someone I respected asked my advice in a
similar circumstance, what would I say?
&
Could I defend the decision if it were made in
public?
&
What kind of results can I expect if the decision
sets a precedent and becomes a general rule?
&
Am I confident that my decision will seem as
reasonable over a long period of time as it
seems now?
7
Presented with a dilemma for example, a situ-
ation in which one suspects that one's immediate
supervisor is romantically involved with a sub-
contractor's representative participants debate
the relative merits of a variety of ways to address
the situation, evaluating facts and issues in the
light of the decision-making model.
(iii) Ethical and social auditing
Legislation that is specifically connected to busi-
ness ethics programs generally focuses directly on
the proclivity of individual employees to mis-
behave, although the term `business ethics' in-
creasingly refers to the conduct of a corporation
as a whole. Thus, in Europe in particular, `ethics'
often refers to corporate social responsibility
such as environmental protection, labor rights,
etc. Non-governmental organizations and audi-
tors have engaged corporate representatives in
social responsibility dialogues, in order to identify
responsibility or ethical auditing criteria.
The auditing profession requires standards
against which an organization's compliance can
be measured. Thus, the proliferation of standards
aimed at reporting on non-financial performance
relies on measurable indicators. With triple
bottom line reporting, for example, the triad of
statistical economic, social, and environmental
indicators forms the basis for a company's sus-
tainability score. Likewise, the Dow Jones Sus-
tainability Group Index distills sustainability into
a finite questionnaire against which respondent
companies self-assess. In general, what process
and performance standards have in common is the
capacity to `measure' by confirming or discon-
firming the existence and implementation of
program components (process), or by evaluating
the results and consequences of the existence of
a program (performance) a company's ethics or
social responsibility against criteria that purport
to define what it is for a company to be ethical or
socially responsible. In this context, to be ethical
or social responsible, a company must prove the
existence of a process and/or show evidence of
having satisfied performance standards.
Does thepresence of philosophy in
business ethics entail that business
ethics is philosophy?
Rules that have been specifically created to govern
the conduct of individuals and groups are not
necessarily philosophical. But there are unmistak-
able traces of philosophical theory in business
ethics programs. First, there is the unmistakable
appropriation by business ethicists of the term
`ethics', a traditionally philosophical term. Beyond
the obvious, however, there is a philosophical
influence on policies in codes of conduct ranging
from the influence of social contract theory on fair
Business Ethics: AEuropean Review
333 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001
competition statutes, the impact of Kantian
absolutism on the presumed sanctity of contracts,
and the impression of an ethic of care on work-life
balance policies.
More obviously, decision models make explicit
use of philosophy in the form of providing an
ethics decision procedure, integrating such notions
as the following:
& the greatest good for the greatest number
(utilitarianism),
& the so-called ``Golden Rule'',
& a Kantian conception of duty,
& a Rawlsian conception of justice,
& virtue ethics,
& an ethic of care.
The prominent use of the term `stakeholder
engagement' in corporate social responsibility
suggests the influence of utilitarian thinking, while
the conflict between absolutism and relativism is
alive and well in debates about the global applic-
ability of ethical and social responsibility stand-
ards.
Perhaps philosophical topics have never fea-
tured quite so prominently in business discourse as
at the present time. But do the policies in codes of
conduct ensure ethical behavior? Is it possible to
distill millennia of philosophical debate about
metaethics into an ethics-in-brief decision proce-
dure? Do utilitarian-based social auditing stan-
dards present a legitimate and well considered
challenge to a traditional criticism of utilitarian-
ism that the `greatest good for the greatest
number' cannot possibly be quantified? In sum, is
business ethics as it is practiced in business settings
philosophically sound?
Moral decision-makingand philosophy
Evaluating the question of whether business ethics
is philosophically sound requires having a con-
ception of what philosophy is, particularly as it
pertains to applying ethical concepts to practical
situations. Business ethicists business people all
of them, subject to performance pressures may
not fit the Socratic description in the Theaetetus
172d of `the free man [who] always has time at his
disposal to converse in peace at his leisure.' They
further do not in general have the luxury that
Socrates had, of working for free. For these
and many other obvious and non-obvious reasons,
I have therefore appropriated the task of evaluat-
ing the philosophical soundness of business ethics
into the philosophical realm. And, for an example
of early, applied philosophy, we need to look no
further than Plato's earliest dialogues to observe
Socrates doing applied ethics.
(i) Socratic philosophy
Thus, for example, in the Euthyphro, Socrates
engages the title character in a conversation about
holiness because the latter has claimed that
prosecuting his father for murdering a servant is
the holy thing to do. The Euthyphro establishes
somewhat of an archetypal plot for Socratic
inquiry, characterized by the following features,
amongst others.
& The `knowledge' that Socrates conveys is `nega-
tive' knowledge. The only knowledge-related
`accomplishment' that Socrates and Euthyphro
achieve is to discover that Euthyphro errs on
each of five attempts to prove that he `knows'
holiness. Euthyphro departs in frustration while
the conversation is still in progress. The episode
is emblematic of why Socrates claimed to be the
wisest man in Athens for ``being quite conscious
of my ignorance''.
& Easy answers are elusive. Socrates does not dis-
miss easy answers in virtue of their being easy,
but he demonstrates that an impressive resume
is not at least on philosophical matters the
equal of a lifetime of philosophical inquiry.
Euthyphro, a comparatively young theologian,
is a poor interlocutor for Socrates on the topic
at hand. The pair fail to conclusively answer the
question that drives their conversation, ``what is
holiness?''
& Socrates promotes the examined life. More than
anything, Socrates is the essential manifestation
of the overused but brilliant aphorism in the
Apology 38b that `the unexamined life is not
worth living.'
8
Although Socrates and Euthyphro
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# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 334
never reach a conclusion about whether or not
prosecuting Euthyphro's father is a holy thing
for Euthyphro to do (and it is not clear that
they ever would have done so had Euthyphro
not abruptly departed), Socrates implies that
Euthyphro's decision to prosecute his father
without continuously examining the decision
could be ethically tragic.
My brief analysis above of `Socratic applied
philosophy' does not provide an exhaustive list
of essential characteristics of what all philosophy
is.
9
In fact, attempting to provide such a char-
acterization would directly conflict with Socrates'
message. The superficial resemblance between
Socratic applied philosophy and recent philos-
ophy, especially recent philosophy in the analytic
tradition, is minimal. One characteristically in-
volves normative, street corner inquiries about
ethical concepts, and the other has at intervals
gone so far as to use science to disavow itself
of any association with normative, ethical specu-
lation.
(ii) Academic philosophy
Until relatively recently with renewed scholarly
interest in traditional theoretical ethics and de-
velopments in such fields as feminist philosophy,
the philosophy of literature, and applied ethics
(including business ethics) analytic philosophy
had done more to tear down the status of ethics as
a credible philosophical topic than to build it up.
G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica is generally be-
lieved to have made a credible case that historical
ethical theories from Aristotle to Augustine,
Kant to Mill, and others before and after con-
tained unjustified assumptions about the meaning
of `goodness'. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous
conclusion to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
that `whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
be silent' relegating ethics and metaphysics,
among other things, to the realm of `whereof one
cannot speak' was interpreted by logical positiv-
ists, rightly or wrongly, as portending a welcome
end to speculative ethics. Though Wittgenstein
went back on his youthful conviction that he had
said all he had to say about philosophy in the
Tractatus, he went on overtly to `speak' only
minimally about ethics.
In the words of Hans Reichenbach, philosophy
especially in the United Kingdom and the
United States ``proceeded from speculation to
science.''
10
The entrenched but important debate
about the relative virtues of cognitivism and
noncognitivism, which revives the work of histor-
ical philosophers in the argument about whether
or not moral utterances assert the existence of
moral facts, is evidence that ethics has yet to
return to the freewheeling status of its past, in
which Philosopher X possessed enough courage
to stake his or her reputation on the supposition
that there could be such a thing as a theory that
conclusively distinguished moral `right' from
`wrong'.
11
Granted, philosophy on the European
Continent, and elsewhere beyond English and
American borders, has been somewhat more
daring and speculative. Nevertheless, arguably,
twentieth century philosophy especially analytic
philosophy has not done as much to offer moral
guidance as to explicate how to ward off moral
mistakes.
Curiously, there is something distinctly Socratic
about this negative, ethical `knowledge'. The
simple fact is that philosophers would not still
be engaged in theoretical, philosophical, ethical
inquiry if they all agreed that there was a single
theory that had been proven, incontrovertibly, to
be `right'. Rather than telling us that it is advisable
to move confidently forward under the assump-
tion that `act only according to that maxim by
which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law' (Kant) is a decision
procedure in each and every case for `right' action,
philosophy tells us that it is not. Likewise for `the
greatest good for the greatest number' (utilitarian-
ism), the golden mean (Aristotle), and, `I say that
the holy is what I am now doing, prosecuting the
wrongdoer' (Euthyphro at 5d).
The proliferation of ethical theories without
agreement as to which one is `right', and the
absence of a common opinion that the newest
ethical theories are better than the oldest ones,
quite solemnly implies that ethics is not a science
(at least not yet, and perhaps not ever). If ethics
has made any scientific progress since Euthyphro
Business Ethics: AEuropean Review
335 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001
failed five times to define `holiness', that progress
has been in the form of eliminating more than five
definitions of moral `right'. Yet the fact that
theoretical ethics and applied ethics carry forward
the struggle to answer the question `how should
a human being live?' is strong testimony to the
Wittgensteinian dictum that what could not be
spoken may well have been more important than
what could.
12
If ethics in the present age resembles a science at
all, it does so in its method for Socratically ruling
out pretenders to the throne of a universal defi-
nition of moral right. The shared lesson of analytic
ethics and Socratic applied ethics is that the
accumulation of negative knowledge constitutes
progress, that there are no easy answers to moral
decision-making, and yet the examination of life
including its moral dimensions must move for-
ward with characteristic, millennia-old urgency.
Is business ethics philosophy?
Comparatively, although the recognized discipline
of business ethics is only decades old, it is carried
forward with an urgency characteristic of the
pursuit of business opportunities. It would not, on
the face of it, consign business ethics to the
category of sophism if business ethicists occasion-
ally claimed to possess positive knowledge or to
clash in some other way with the preceding
conception of philosophy. It is, however, worth
raising a skeptical eye about the philosophical
soundness of undertakings that do all of three
things: 1) claim to convey positive knowledge;
2) provide easy answers; and 3) in so doing,
compromise examined living.
Ethical leadership can only flounder if it has a
shaky philosophical foundation on which to
stand. Thus, there is reason to be concerned about
the fact that the examples of business ethics
practice in this paper appear to do the following:
&
They suggest `knowledge' of what is right.
Executives' sweeping claims about the universal
ethical character of their sometimes mon-
strously large organizations are not only
incredible, but they also imply that he or she
who makes the claim is in a position to know
what ethical character is. Defining ethics as
obeying the letter and spirit of laws is at best
circular, in that the spirit of the laws is their
presumed ethical foundation. The notions that
there is a `right thing' to do, and that there are
`levels of integrity and trust', suggest that there
is a hierarchy (possibly knowable) of moral right
and wrong. This suggestion begs the question
of why millennia of philosophical history have
failed to result in knowledge of such a hier-
archy.
&
They suggest that brief, step-by-step decision-
models and/or measurable indicators can lead to
ethical knowledge/answers to ethical questions.
Rather than choosing one ethical theory as the
key to moral right, the decision-making models
sampled above eschew the notion that any one
theory has been proven to be the key. However,
they engage in the questionable practice of
trying to blend millennia of philosophical
history into a few simple steps. Similarly, the
existence of standards for ethical auditing
suggests that ethics is a measurable concept.
For ethics to be measurable, however, there
must be a clear conception of what it means to
be ethical. Again, this suggestion begs the ques-
tion of why millennia of philosophical history
have failed to result in knowledge of such a
conception.
&
They suggest that ethics is not a continuous
process of examination, but rather a finite
process with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Having proposed that the issue of what is
ethical is decidable, ethical inquiry in business
ethics appears to be complete. There is thus a
spuriously opportunistic bravado in the exam-
ples of business ethics practice that hints that
they possess answers that the great historical
philosophers failed to capture. The implication
is that all that remains for business ethics is to
provide the answers not to continue ethical
inquiry.
Conclusion
In the context of my characterization of business
ethics, the business ethicist more strongly resembles
Volume10 Number 4 October 2001
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 336
the sophist who claims to know ethics than the
philosopher who is engaged in a process of
seemingly infinitely long ethical inquiry. But it
would be a potentially wanton leap from here to
conclude that the business ethicist is guilty of
sophism, one not altogether unlike the unjust
verdict of the Athenian majority against Socrates
for his vulnerability to the subtle distinction
between legitimate and illegitimate claims to
knowledge.
In defense of business ethics, it should be said
that the most progressive business ethics practi-
tioners have transformed business ethics from a
litigation-inspired risk management function to a
values-oriented, social responsibility advocating
platform for examined discussion of professional
conduct. In this context, rules and measures are a
compromise between the need to evaluate specific
actions and decisions against fixed criteria, and
the wisdom that the Platonic Form of ethical be-
havior may never be attained. Similarly, decision-
making models are not conceived as decision pro-
cedures capable of rendering conclusive answers,
but rather as collections of historical, philosophi-
cal thought capable of engendering meaningful, if
not decidable, discussion about ethical dilemmas.
Business ethics can function as a reasonable
response to unreasonable pressures to reach
decisions on issues involving an ethical dimension
a response contending that it is better to
continue examining an issue than to make an ill-
fated decision resting upon false knowledge.
I do not conclude, therefore, that business
ethics is sophism, but rather that business ethics
is seriously vulnerable to the charge that it is
sophism, appearing to make unfounded claims
about knowledge of ethical matters. This appear-
ance gives way to reality when those claims, in the
proclamations of the philosophically careless,
reach the point of positively identifying `the right
thing' a frighteningly common phrase among
those who give advice about business ethics, and
even more common among those business leaders
who receive that advice.
Business ethics should not be in the sole custody
of philosophers, but nor should sound philo-
sophical practice be left out of business ethics.
13
I have heard it remarked many times in casual
conversation (usually with non-philosophers) that
if everybody were like Socrates, we would have
full minds but our bodies would starve to death.
Socrates, somewhat like Saint Francis of Assisi,
may not have exacted a material fee for his intel-
lectual services, but he could not have survived
without the material generosity of others. (Were
he a citizen of a contemporary democracy, he
almost certainly would have had to pay taxes on
what he received). Socrates at his most caricatured
does indeed have his head in Aristophanes' clouds,
and cannot serve as a comprehensive example of
good living. All of this lends credibility to the
objection that the method of Socratic applied
philosophy is a poor business model.
It would therefore be excessive to expect all
business people to be philosophers. But it would
be a serious mistake for business leaders to ignore
philosophical advice: the `rat race' is a poor basis
for doing sound philosophy. If the philosopher
has the free man's luxury of `time at his disposal to
converse in peace at his leisure', then that time
may be well spent proving his or her value to
society at large by examining the life of business.
Conversely, the business leader would do well to
increase his or her investment in philosophical
wisdom, foregoing the temptation to hastily
resolve business's immediate dilemmas and to
examine instead business's methods, motivations,
and value to society at large.
14
Notes
1. In the Apology 31c, he points out that, in contrast
to some of his accusers, he never ``exacted or asked
a fee from anyone.'' All quotes and/or references to
Platonic dialogues in this paper use translations
from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985). That
edition's translator of the Apology is Hugh
Tredennick; of the Euthyphro, Lane Cooper; and
of the Theaetetus, F. M. Cornford.
2. Socrates paid Athens for his work with his life, and
Athenians paid sophists for their work. This is just
one of the ironies of the free market that what
people are willing to pay for goods and services is
not always a good measure of their value.
Business Ethics: AEuropean Review
337 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001
3. The fact that the government has had to create
incentives to urge organizations to promote ethical
behavior raises the question of whether promoting
ethics primarily because it is in one's direct finan-
cial interest to do so can be accurately character-
ized as ethical behavior. This is a question that is
beyond the scope of this paper, though I am devel-
oping a related examination of the question in the
context of Aristotle's characterization of `utility'
friendships in the Nicomachean Ethics.
4. For a useful and succinct summary of the govern-
ment's role in the American experience with busi-
ness ethics, see Sheena Carmichael, Business Ethics:
The New Bottom Line, (London: Demos, 1995).
5. Several studies estimate that more than 80% of
major companies have codes of conduct (see e.g.
Center for Business Ethics, `Instilling Ethical
Values in Large Corporations,' (Journal of Busi-
ness Ethics, vol. 12, 1992) and Price Waterhouse,
1996 Survey of Corporate Compliance Practices).
Further, many companies supplement a code with
formal training, communication, or other ethics
education. (The Center for Business Ethics study
reports that workshops, seminars, meetings, and
in-house training programs were held at between
40% and 50% of respondent organizations. That
figure appears to have grown since 1992.) Many of
those companies are not afraid to trumpet the
claim that they are ethically committed. Curtis
Verschoor's 1999 study of Fortune 500 manage-
ment reports, `Corporate Performance is Strongly
Linked to a Strong Ethical Commitment' (Business
and Society Review 1999), states that ``just under
27 percent of the 500 largest public companies make
a public representation (in greater or lesser detail)
that an expectation of ethical behavior or confor-
mity to a code of ethics or corporate code of con-
duct is an aspect of their internal control system.''
6. Some companies make ethics program materials
publicly available to encourage feedback and to
promote ethics as a part of the company's public
image. Because of variances in corporate confi-
dentiality restrictions, no company names are used
in this paper in association with ethics program
materials. All such materials quoted and/or de-
scribed in this paper were produced in 1997 or later
by publicly held Fortune 500 companies in various
industries.
7. This third example of a decision-making model
is set forth in Dawn-Marie Driscoll, W. Michael
Hoffman, and Edward Petry's The Ethical Edge
(New York: Mastermedia, 1995).
8. So goes the famous version of the quote. In the
edition I am citing, the translation goes, ``life
without this sort of examination is not worth
living.''
9. Nor does my analysis exhaustively describe Socratic
inquiry. However, the three characteristics that
I have cited as characteristic of Socrates' brand of
`applied philosophy' are fairly typical of recog-
nized, scholarly descriptions of Socratic inquiry.
The old-fashioned conception of philosophy,
exposing ignorance as a way to modestly revise
claims to knowledge, is not uniquely Socratic. It is
echoed, among other places, in Plato's distinction
between knowledge and belief in the Republic,
Augustine's Confessions, Descartes' self-doubt,
Kant's phenomena / noumena distinction, and the
early Wittgenstein's refusal to speak.
10. The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1951).
11. Works as diverse as Michael Dummett's The
Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), Bertrand Russell's
A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1945), and Cornel West's The American
Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989) more or less confirm this
generally accepted description of the methods and
consequences of analytic philosophy. My emphasis
on analytic philosophy as representative of recent
philosophy in part reflects the dominance of ana-
lytic philosophy on contemporary philosophy in
English-speaking countries, and in part reflects the
related bias of my own philosophical education.
12. This claim is made several times by Ray Monk in
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New
York: Penguin Books, 1991).
13. A recent exchange in Business Ethics Quarterly
comes to mind, sparked by E.R. Klein's `The One
Necessary Condition for a Successful Business
Ethics Course: The Teacher Must be a Philos-
opher' (Vol. 8, No. 3, July 1998) and continued in
William C. Frederick's `One Voice or Many? A
Response to Ellen Klein' (Vol. 8, No. 3, July 1998)
and John Morse's `Who is the Ethics Expert? The
Original Footnote to Plato' (Vol. 9, No. 4, October
1999). Klein's claim that business ethics courses
should be taught by `experts in ethics' (PhDs in
philosophy) is remindful of my claim that business
ethics practitioners should practice in the (Socratic)
philosophical tradition. Frederick, objecting to
Klein's argument, calls for a plurality of peda-
gogical perspectives, and Morse makes the Aris-
Volume10 Number 4 October 2001
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 338
totelian claim that the theoretical contribution of
academic philosophers should be conjoined with
the practical knowledge of those more familiar
with the business enterprise. Without explicitly
siding with any of these authors, I wish to point
out that my general claim that business ethics
practice ought to be philosophically sound has no
necessary bias toward any of these authors' views.
Other scholars and/or practitioners of business
ethics have pointed out that the professional
`qualifications' for a business ethicist have yet to
be defined, and that it will probably be some time
before there are agreed upon standards (for
example, Peter J. Dean, `Examining the Profession
and the Practice of Business Ethics' (University
of Tennessee, unpublished draft paper, 1997), and
Robert C. Holland, `Professionalizing Business
Ethics' (The Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania, unpublished draft paper, 1996).
14. One of my objectives that is connected to, but
beyond the scope of, this paper is to constructively
examine what business ethics can do beyond
distinguishing right from wrong in the context of
particular business ethics dilemmas. This final sen-
tence is a brief statement of a direction, in which
business ethics has occasionally gone, but with
regard to which it has yet to define itself toward
what would perhaps more accurately be termed a
Philosophy of Work (along the lines of what exists
in Continental philosophy in the tradition of
Hannah Arendt's distinction between labor, work,
and action). This line of inquiry would bring to
bear a broad range of philosophical inquiry on
such questions as these: what are the ethical
foundations for the free market (the methods of
business)? What is the purpose of work (the
motivations of business)? What is the value of
particular business entities to societies at large?
Business Ethics: AEuropean Review
339 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

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