Hegel's Moral Corporation

Thomas Klikauer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137547385
• eBook ISBN: 9781137547408
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Hegel's Moral Corporation is about two versions of a corporation, one business oriented and dedicated to shareholder-value and profit-maximisation and one dedicated to moral life, Sittlichkeit, in Hegelian terms.

1

Introduction: Hegel’s Philosophy of Corporations

The corporation is the only institution of civil society upon which Hegel unqualifiedly bestows the epithet ‘sittlich’.1

Business ethics is often seen as an oxymoron because business and ethics seem to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps this is even more so when moral philosophy is being linked to corporations. Reading through standard business ethics textbooks, one finds it is hard to avoid the impression that the field of business ethics is aware of this. It appears as if business ethics shields business and corporations from moral philosophy, reducing it to a few introductory pages that superficially ‘highlight’ selected elements of business ethics. As a consequence, it has become quite common in books and textbooks on business ethics, management, and corporations to focus on so-called key ethical themes such as virtue ethics, Kantian ethics,2 utilitarianism, and perhaps occasionally on Rawls’ ethics of ‘Justice as Fairness’. Most textbooks, however, quickly proceed with a short overview of other ethical issues (marketing, wellbeing, whistle-blowing, etc.). In other words, one finds ‘the relegation of moral and political problems and value judgements to the extreme margins of [managerial] textbooks’.3 The issue of management ethics seems to be a surface-structure rather than a deep-structure issue (Chomsky 1957). Remaining at the surface, standard management literature rarely finds managerial themes such as corporations discussed in the light of specific philosophers.4

As a consequence, it appears rather unusual for a scholarly book in the general area of management to engage with a specific aspect of moral philosophy, for example, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit,5 linked to a specific managerial institution: the corporation.6 But a book on Hegelian Sittlichkeit linked to corporations can illuminate today’s role of management in relation to corporations because ‘Hegel has especially positive things to say about the corporation’.7 Such a book is not an overall examination of management ethics found in standard textbooks on management, nor is it a critical assessment of management on the base of a wide range of moral philosophies.8 In contrast to more general books on management, this book examines one single institution of management – corporations – from the standpoint of a specific philosopher: German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).9 This is in line with the fact ‘that Hegel wishes philosophy to confront “reality” i.e., economics in general and political economy in particular’.10 To honour this Hegelian commitment, this book investigates Hegel’s engagement with modern economy within which Hegel placed the corporation.11 In essence, this book is concerned with just six paragraphs – Philosophy of Right (1821:§§250–256) – of Hegel’s entire philosophical work.

There appears to be a near total neglect or ‘veil of ignorance’12 when it comes to including Hegelian philosophy in management ethics.13 This applies across the board to nearly all writers of textbooks on management ethics and even more so to standard management textbooks. If management ethics is viewed from the perspective of one of the most used models in management, the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis that operates with defender, prospector, analyser, and reactor, for example, the following picture emerges.14 The field of management ethics carries connotations of being Miles and Snow’s ‘defender’ rather than their ‘prospector’ because management ethics appears to defend its position enshrined in the narrow box of the perceived three to four so-called key themes of ethics which are virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, and perhaps Rawls’ ‘Justice as Fairness’.15

Many publications of management ethics (the morality of management seen as an internal issue) and business ethics (focusing more on external issues) do not prospect beyond the much trumpeted standard range of four to five key themes. Unlike these, this book on Hegel and corporations seeks to engage with moral philosophy outside the three standard themes of virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, and utilitarianism. It is because of this self-imposed limitation or, as Rawls might see it, ‘veil of ignorance’16 that the field of business ethics hardly ever ventures deeper into moral philosophy and contemporary developments within it.

In other words, the standard approach of business ethics shows the very opposite of what the US television show Star Trek has popularised as ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The final frontier of most management ethics writers is to stay inside the box of what is perceived to be standard ethical theories. Management ethics is not on a mission to explore new worlds. It does not seek out new life and new ethical theories nor does it ‘boldly go where no man has gone before’. In other words, management ethics remains asphyxiated inside its defender status; it displays ignorance towards what lies beyond the confinements of its three to four key themes, and the field is characterised by a staunch avoidance of prospecting beyond the well-documented depth of traditional and contemporary moral philosophy. Given that, it is not surprising that management ethics is a field that shows total ignorance towards Hegelian philosophy (cf. Klikauer 2013a). This is in spite of the fact that Hegel wrote comprehensively on morality, ethics, and ethical life.17 Hegel remains the only classical philosopher who directly engaged with the corporation – Die Korporation.18

Since its invention, management ethics has remained in blissful ignorance of even those philosophers who have extensively dealt with one key managerial issue: corporations.19 Perhaps the only significant exception is Alister MacIntyre’s article on ‘Why are the Problems of Business Ethics Insolvable?’ (1983) and his work is not even directed towards the corporation. No modern philosopher has dealt with corporations in the way Hegel has.20 Not surprisingly, Hegel is not only the first but remains the only modern philosopher ever to engage with corporations on a systematic (Philosophy of Right, 1821),21 philosophical (through his overall work), and ethical level (Phenomenology, 1807).22 Most importantly, he engaged corporations from the standpoint of his moral philosophy that he calls Sittlichkeit, which is Hegel’s key term [Schlüsselbegriff] and which is commonly translated into moral life.23 No other modern philosopher who has developed a comprehensive ethical system has included corporations in such a system.24 Hegel remains the only philosopher to have achieved this. In the words of American philosopher William Maker (1987:22), ‘Hegel is a thinker of modernity who has conceptualised the family, economics [and corporations], society, and the state in a distinctively modern and original way.’

This book first examines Hegel’s link between corporations and his ethics of Sittlichkeit or ethical life. This is the morality link between Sittlichkeit and corporations. It closes the gap in standard management literature. Secondly, it presents so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Hegel’s Philosophy of Corporations
• 2 Modern Corporations and Hegel’s Ethical Corporation
• 3 The Morality of Management Studies
• 4 Corporations and Hegel’s Ethical Institutions
• 5 The Morality of Corporate Relationships
• 6 Corporate Governance and Sittlichkeit
• 7 Corporate Governance Rationality and Morality
• 8 Corporations and Sittlichkeit
• 9 Conclusion: The Moral Corporation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index