The Moral Background

An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics

Gabriel Abend

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691171128, 9780691159447
• eBook ISBN: 9781400850341
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ética empresarial

In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s.

According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This background underlies the behavioral and normative levels; it supports, facilitates, and enables them.

Through this perspective, Abend historically examines the work of numerous business ethicists and organizations—such as Protestant ministers, business associations, and business schools—and identifies two types of moral background. "Standards of Practice" is characterized by its scientific worldview, moral relativism, and emphasis on individuals' actions and decisions. The "Christian Merchant" type is characterized by its Christian worldview, moral objectivism, and conception of a person's life as a unity.

The Moral Background offers both an original account of the history of business ethics and a novel framework for understanding and investigating morality in general.

1

The Moral Background

1.1 Morality as an Object of Inquiry

What is the moral background? How does it differ from other familiar moral objects, such as moral judgments, beliefs, and norms? Let me begin to address this question by means of an analogy between science and morality. Consider a journal article in molecular biology or political science, which advances the empirical claim, “X causes Y.” According to a traditional conception of science, this claim aims at the truth, understood roughly as correspondence to the world. Science makes progress by accumulating more and more truths about what the world is like and how the world works. In the history of molecular biology and political science, each individual scientist has made a small contribution to the human store of truth—a timeless, placeless, universal collection of propositions. This traditional conception of science has been questioned on many grounds and for many reasons, especially after Kuhn’s 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For my present purposes, one of these lines of criticism is most relevant. Kuhn and later many philosophers and sociologists of science (and earlier, Polanyi, and much earlier, Fleck) have argued that scientists belong to and work within communities. This is what Fleck calls “thought collectives” (“Denkkollektiven”) or “thought communities” (“Denkgemeinschaften”).¹

Unlike the universal community of science imagined by the traditional conception, these thought communities are historically specific. For instance: Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, U.S. structural-functionalist sociology, or Paraguayan Marxist sociology. Like any community, they have common practices, languages, and understandings. What is it that members of a scientific community share, exactly? For one, they likely share many social and demographic characteristics. That helps account sociologically for their having become members of that community in the first place. More important, they have common epistemological and ontological intuitions, dispositions, or assumptions. They agree on how you go about answering a scientific question, and what kind of evidence and how much of it you need to corroborate a hypothesis. Even more: they agree on what is a scientific question and what is not, and what is an interesting and important scientific question, and what is a stupid or ridiculous one. To quote Kuhn, “what is a problem and what a solution” is internal to each thought community.² For example, whether X causes Y is a worthwhile question for the above-mentioned molecular biologists and political scientists, partly because they are in the causal business: the business of unearthing the causal structure of the natural and social worlds, respectively.

Further, members of a thought community generally agree on what there is, that is, what the world contains. They generally agree, too, on what there is not, that is, what does not exist. And they share an inventory or repertoire of concepts that is at their disposal—that is, the set of concepts they may choose to use. For instance, after Becher and before Lavoisier, scientific chemists believed that the world contained phlogiston. Contemporary physicists believe that the world contains quarks (which have different flavors). Contemporary biologists believe that the world contains animal species. Similarly, both Newtonian and Einsteinian physicists believed that an object had a “mass,” even though they did not mean the same thing by that word. To return to the molecular biologists’ and political scientists’ claim, “X causes Y,” X and Y must be real entities or classes of entities for them—say, genes, memes, information, classes, public spheres, political cultures, or economies. Moreover, both of these communities must have the concept of causation, that is, they must believe that causation is a real relationship that can obtain between two entities.

This Kuhnian line of argument can be taken in various directions. You may investigate the shared epistemologies of particular thought communities.³ You may build on Wittgenstein’s ideas about linguistic communities and ways of life.⁴ You may build on Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s ideas about incommensurability.⁵ Or you may add a critical edge to the argument—critical of science’s self-understanding as the final arbiter of truth.⁶ What matters here is that all of this work is based on a distinction between the empirical claims of a community of scientists—e.g., “It is the case that p,” or “It is the case that X causes Y”—and its ontology and epistemology. The empirical claims are necessarily explicit and thus easy to see. They are first-order claims, sets of statements that occur in journal articles and conference presentations. Their subject matter might be molecular biology, social stratification, or avian ethology. In contrast, ontologies and epistemologies are either more hidden from view or completely hidden from view. They underlie, support, and make possible first-order molecular biology, social stratification, and avian ethology claims. But they are not themselves about molecular biology, social stratification, or avian ethology.

Having looked at science, I can now turn to the promised analogy with morality. In this book I argue that first-order morality is underlain by a second-order moral background. Just like any first-order scientific theory is underlain by a second-order understanding about the nature of knowledge, any first-order moral prescription, norm, value, institution, or action is underlain by a second-order understanding about the nature of morality. Just like any first-order scientific theory is advanced with the help of certain scientific tools and concepts, any first-order moral prescription is advanced with the help of certain moral tools and concepts. For example, the epistemological commitments of a scientific community answer this question:

(i) In virtue of what is something—e.g., an empirical claim or theory—acceptable or good, scientifically speaking? Is it in virtue of its truth, explanatory power, predictive power, parsimony, simplicity, beauty, or all of the above? Differently put, what makes it scientifically good?

Analogously, the epistemological commitments of a moral community answer this question:

(ii) In virtue of what is something—e.g., a normative claim or institution—acceptable or good, morally speaking? For instance, assume that helping strangers is a morally good thing and slavery is a morally bad thing. Then, what makes them good and bad things, respectively? Is slavery morally bad because it decreases the total amount of utility or pleasure in the world, because it is intrinsically wrong, because nobody can rationally desire to be a slave, because it is against the will of God, or all of the above?

The background provides the theories and tools that people and organizations employ to ascertain goodness in the realm of morality—implicitly or explicitly, in their day-to-day life, interactions, institutions, law, and elsewhere. In practice, these theories and tools offer them acceptable moral grounds or reasons, which they may use if needed. What is more, the background provides the criteria for morality’s or moral considerations’ being relevant in a situation in the first place. In some situations morality is not applicable. Say, if a pig, a horse, or a rat harms a person—for it obviously cannot be morally responsible. But in some other situations morality is applicable. Say, if a pig, a horse, or a rat harmed a person in medieval Europe—for it obviously was morally responsible.⁷ I use the word “obviously” to highlight an important fact about the background: while this difference about what can be responsible stems from complex moral, religious, and metaphysical views, it generally manifests itself as an intuition. You do not need to be aware of these moral, religious, and metaphysical views to know that, today, it would be crazy to morally evaluate a pig’s behavior. It just feels crazy.

As we will see shortly, that is one dimension of the moral background: what can and cannot be evaluated from a moral point of view. The analogy between science and morality helps us see yet another dimension of the background, which the next section also spells out. The quantum physics paradigm offers a particular repertoire of concepts: superposition, uncertainty, tunneling, nonlocality, entanglement, decoherence, duality, wave function, and so on. Naturally, the experiments, claims, and theories of quantum physicists are made possible by these concepts. Physicists working under a different paradigm would simply be unable to make them. For all their genius, neither Newton nor Aristotle could have made them. Similarly, a community’s moral background offers a particular repertoire of concepts. Sadly, we are all too familiar with exploitative, materialistic, chauvinistic, and sexist people, and with despotic, oppressive, and fanatical regimes. These moral concepts have complex institutional and cultural preconditions, which do not obtain in all societies. Where they do not obtain, these sad observations cannot be made. In this sense, the moral background is comparable to the quantum physics paradigm, except that in physics, conceptual innovation is a deliberate undertaking, for which a Nobel Prize may be awarded. Now, there being these moral concepts for us to use (rather than some others) is not a fact about first-order morality. It is a fact about the second-order, enabling, and constraining moral background level.

I have given a preliminary depiction of the moral background and its relationship to first-order morality. To better see this relationship, table 1.1 represents my tripartite conceptual framework. The second column presents some empirical questions at each of the three levels. It does so in a general form, which applies to any moral area or issue. The third column presents some empirical questions specifically about business ethics—some of which the following chapters of the book empirically investigate. However, neither column is intended to be exhaustive of the issues each level covers; they only provide a few illustrative examples.

Why care about the moral background? Why is it worth studying empirically? The first-order normative level and the first-order behavioral level are no doubt worth studying, because of their contributions to both theory and practice. Yet, current scientific understandings of morality are impoverished because of their neglect of the moral background, what it contains, how it varies, and how it affects the normative and behavioral levels. Starting our empirical investigations at the level of people’s first-order morality is like arriving to the theater only for the second act—to use another evocative but not perfectly accurate metaphor. Scientists of morality have looked at practices and institutions that produce and reproduce moral norms and values. They have looked at people’s moral convictions, evaluations, and actions. But they have not looked at what makes these moral norms, values, convictions, evaluations, and actions, nor what accounts for our being able to have these moral beliefs and perform these moral actions (rather than those that could be had and performed in other places and times). In brief, currently we see organizations and individuals who carry out actions, endorse and enforce norms, and hold convictions. But we do not see the background that underlies and makes possible all of this. We do not see the first act, which sets the stage for the second act.

Table 1.1: The Three Levels of the Science of Morality

Level	Empirical Questions	Business Ethics Examples
First-order normative	(i) Given a society or group, what are people’s moral views and understandings, e.g., about what is right, good, permissible, obligatory, admirable, etc.? What moral norms and institutions are there? (ii) What accounts for first-order normative differences within a society or group and across societies or groups?	(i) Given a society or group, what business practices are deemed morally right and wrong? For example, how is the distinction between advertising and misrepresentation drawn? Do companies have obligations to the community, their competitors, and the environment? (ii) What accounts for differences across groups and societies and over time in the business practices deemed morally right and wrong? What accounts for a practice moving from one category to another (e.g., from advertising to misrepresentation)? What accounts for differences across groups and societies and over time in the degree to which a practice is deemed morally reprehensible (e.g., borderline, pretty bad, hideous)?
First-order behavioral	(i) Given a society or group, what moral and immoral behaviors are carried out (whatever counts as moral and immoral there)? (ii) What accounts for first-order behavioral differences within a society or group and across societies or groups? What accounts for the frequency of ethical and unethical behavior in that group? What accounts for change over time? What factors affect the odds of someone’s engaging in ethical or unethical behavior?	(i) Given a society or group, what unethical business practices are most and least common? How are they actually carried out? (ii) Under what conditions are particular unethical business practices more and less likely to occur? What accounts for differences across groups and societies and over time in their occurrence? (iii) What individuals and organizations perform business ethics work (e.g., schools, universities, families, business associations, state agencies, the media, religious organizations, etc.)? What does their work consist of?
Moral background	(i) Given a society or group, what counts as a moral action and a moral reason? What counts as a moral problem and as an important moral problem? (ii) How do you go about asking and answering moral questions? What are moral questions primarily about? (iii) What objects can and cannot be morally evaluated? (iv) What kinds of reasons do individuals and organizations use to support moral views and actions? What kinds of ethical theories are these reasons based on? (v) Is morality taken to be capable of objectivity? (vi) What metaphysical assumptions underlie first-order morality? (vii) What repertoire of moral concepts is available in that society? What concepts do individuals and organizations use frequently and successfully?	(i) Given a society or group, which business ethics problems, projects, and proposals are forceful in the public sphere? Which ones are not forceful, not important, implausible, or ludicrous? (ii) What is business ethicists’ starting point and main interest? For example, do they focus on what businesspeople do or on what businesspeople are? (iii) Can a company be morally responsible? Can business (that is, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Moral Background
• Chapter 2. Ethics as a Business Proposition
• Chapter 3. Christian Motives
• Chapter 4. The Good of American Business
• Chapter 5. The Good of American Society
• Chapter 6. Standards of Practice
• Chapter 7. The Christian Merchant
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Index