It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Patricia Werhane’s contributions to the field of business ethics as an academic discipline. It has been has been enormous and far reaching, as a glance at her curriculum vitae attests. She has written or edited, singly or with others, 27 books in the field; she has written or co-authored 77 articles, 69 book chapters, and 74 case studies; and she has given 241 lectures or presentations. She was one of the founders and first officers of the Society for Business Ethics, one of the founders and the first Editor-in-Chief of the Business Ethics Quarterly, President of the International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics, and has received numerous honors and awards.
Some scholars labor on the plains. They are excellent at seeing the small details in their work, and their view is keen but limited. Others, mountain people, climb to the summit and gaze freely out onto the totality within their broad purview. Pat has toiled both on the plains and on the summit. I shall not comment on her work on the plains, for others in this volume discuss specific aspects of her work. Rather I shall present and comment on three aspects of her influence that I think are central: her contributions to defining the field; the importance of her emphasis on moral imagination, mental models, and systems thinking; and her methodology in developing a distinctive view of business ethics. In each case I take the liberty of going beyond what I find explicitly in her work to what I find implicitly—the latter sometimes being more important than the former.
Defining the Field
Professor Werhane was one of the founders of the field of academic business ethics. What she did in the early years came to help define the field for a large number of those who followed after her. She cleared a path where there was none, and others followed. If one goes back to when Pat entered the general area of business ethics, there was no academic field of business ethics. There was, of course, what I have called ethics in business,1 that is, people--both business people and academics—made moral evaluations of and in business. There was also the academic field of social issues in management. When she was asked as an assistant professor at Loyola University to teach a course on ethical issues in business, there were no textbooks in the area. She had to decide what to teach, how to teach the subject, and what material to use. Her then-colleague at Loyola, Thomas Donaldson, was in the same boat, and they combined forces. The result of that effort emerged in print as one of the first anthologies in business ethics: Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach (1979). This is the first of four steps in defining the field.
1. As the title of the book indicates, the Donaldson-Werhane anthology took a philosophical approach to ethical issues in business. The emphasis on a philosophical approach was in part what distinguished business ethics, as the field became known, from social issues in management, which was taught in business schools, and which took primarily a social sciences approach to social issues. Initially business ethics was taught primarily in philosophy departments. The text was at least apparently aimed at philosophy professors teaching the course. They could be presumed to know ethical theory and did not have to be told what it was or how to do an ethical analysis. They would also be familiar with many of the writings in the text—pieces by Hobbes, Butler, Smith, Marx, Locke, Rawls, and various contemporary philosophers. Since there was no field of business ethics at the time, the editors took the best writings they could find on ethical issues in business. The writings by non-philosophers were typically written from the viewpoint of conventional morality. The book was divided into three parts: “Philosophical Issues in Business Ethics”, “Economics, Values and Justice,” and “Rights, Liability and the State”. Each part was further broken down into specific topics. The text thus provided the scaffolding for a course in business ethics. One could argue about the specific divisions, and what was included and omitted. But its importance was in showing that there was a set of related ethical issues in business that formed a rough sort of a whole. From the start the text included cases, since the case-study method was dominant in schools of business. The text became one of the sources that other teachers who entered the field used to teach themselves what business ethics was. Many of the early papers submitted to business ethics meetings or conferences referenced the articles collected in that text (and its competitor by Beauchamp and Bowie (1979)), as if those were the only writings in the area. It was a while before a new body of literature in the field emerged, and the early texts came in fact to define the field.
As the market began to switch from courses taught in philosophy departments to courses taught in business schools, the assumption that the teachers would know ethical theory became doubtful, and in later editions of Ethical Issues in Business, Werhane and Donaldson introduced a brief presentation of ethical theory and ethical argumentation in their “Introduction to Ethical Reasoning”. An unintended consequence was that teachers and authors who relied primarily on this and similar texts for their philosophical approach to ethical reasoning suffered from the syndrome of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” They did analyses from a utilitarian or a deontological point of view (or less frequently from an Aristotelian point of view) that failed to show command of the nuances of those approaches, and they frequently contrasted approaches from the two points of view as if one could take one’s choice of method in ethical analysis and reach the conclusion one wanted on either side of an issue. The 7th edition (2002) included a chapter on the Kantian approach to ethics and one on the Aristotelian approach. The 8th edition (2008) added a chapter on the utilitarian approach and another on the approach of pragmatism. The question of what to do with the four approaches remained up to the teacher or student. It is not clear what Professor Werhane’s view on that matter is, but the anthology did not fall into the trap of countering each article with its antithesis. Yet many divergent voices were presented, and some students and perhaps their teachers, could and did take away the feeling, if not the belief, that if one were smart enough one could justify whatever position he or she wanted. The critical task of evaluating the variety of arguments presented and of forming a coherent approach from the diversity presented remained the task—often unfulfilled—of the students or teacher. These deficiencies could not be remedied by changing the contents of the anthology, although Werhane and Donaldson did make changes with each new edition, making it more inclusive and introducing the new material in business ethics as it appeared in conferences and in print. By the eighth edition the book had a different feel. There were more case studies, fewer articles from the classical philosophers, and five parts to reflect the field as it had developed. The book now had a coherent structure and was not simply a collection of ethical issues in business. It wasn’t comprehensive or exhaustive in its coverage, but it did not pretend to be and by its nature could not be.
Professor Werhane, however, took other means to help remedy the obstacles posed by the limitations of an anthology.
2. A field is not defined simply by having textbooks and having teachers teach courses with the title of business ethics or moral issues in business, or the like. Initially those who started working in what was to become an academic field worked pretty much in isolation, with one or two people at any given college or university. The start of the Society for Business Ethics offered a professional venue where those isolated individuals could come together, share their experiences, discuss new issues and approaches, and begin to function as a distinct group. Defining the field required imagination. The initial work consisted of seeing business through a moral lens, from a moral point of view, from the point of view of consumers and workers as well as of managers, and from a variety of perspectives rather than simply those adopted by business and generally accepted by the general population. That meant challenging the view that “business is business” meant acceptance of the way business operated, as if it operated according to laws of nature which are to be adapted to and not changed.
The Society for Business Ethics was started by a small group of philosophers in 1980.2 It is no coincidence that the Society, which initially met together with the American Philosophical Association at the December meeting of the Association’s Eastern Division, was initially run from Loyola University. Professor Werhane was the one who ran the operation in her capacity as the equivalent of secretary-treasurer (the Society initially had no designated officers). The existence of the Society started to give the field an identity and its meetings provided an outlet for papers. In addition, Werhane and Donaldson ran an annual conference in Chicago on business ethics. The organizers of the meeting chose the general topic, invited key speakers, and initially vetted the summited papers. So once again they had a hand in helping define the field as a field.
A challenge from the start of the field was how to encourage younger scholars and graduate students to choose the field as their area of specialization. Professor Werhane was especially acutely attuned to the need for graduate students to have a forum of colleagues with similar interests, and she spearheaded the Emerging Scholars program as an integral part of the Society. Just as faculty members were often isolated in their institutions, so were graduate students. The Society, through its Emerging Scholars program, not only gave them a forum and venue to meet faculty and students from other institutions with similar interests, but also provided students with helpful comments, questions and suggestions on their theses or other research interests from those with more experience and knowledge in the field.
3. The next step was a journal. Those who started publishing articles in business ethics found the number of outlets amenable to their work was minimal. To become an accepted field those in it had to produce contributions of high quality; and to get promoted, assistant professors had to publish in prestigious journals. In truth, many of the early papers written for submission were not of high quality, which is not surprising for a fledgling field in the process of defining itself. What was needed, although probably not articulated as such, was a high quality, highly visible academic journal. Werhane was instrumental in founding the Society’s journal, the Business Ethics Quarterly, and served as its first Editor-in-Chief. The first issue of the Business Ethics Quarterly appeared in January 1991.
As its first Editor in Chief she made a lasting impact on the journal. She helped set its parameters and set and enforced its academic standards through its editorial process. From the start the journal was not only a publishing outlet, but a center of learning. The journal expected its editorial reviewers not only to require high quality in papers they recommended for publication but also to write detailed comments that would help authors whose papers were rejected or recommended for revision-and-resubmission to redo their papers. The point was to help those newer to the field to learn better what a good paper looked like, where the deficiencies were in the submitted paper, and to improve the authors’ imaginations, enlarge their perspective, tighten their arguments, reexamine their assumptions, and so improve their submissions. The journal was interdisciplinary from the start, accepting papers not only from philosophers on ethical theory or normative ethics, but also from scholars in the social sciences doing empirical research, and lawyers approaching business ethics from the vantage point of law.
Werhane moved from Loyola to The Darden Business School at the University of Virginia in 1993, and was instrumental in helping forge the training of Ph. D. students in the newly emerging field. She championed the graduate students in business ethics both at Darden and elsewhere and through the Emerging Scholars program of the Society for Business Ethics, which she has continued to shepherd throughout the years, and through other initiatives she promoted their development and supported them in their work. Her students bear her imprint in a specific way and they promoted in their teaching and writing her view of the field.
4. General ethics is often divided into two parts: descriptive ethics and normative ethics, and it was natural, initially, to think that a similar division existed in business ethics. Descriptive ethics, as the name implies, consists in describing moral codes, beliefs, and norms of a society or of portions thereof. It falls most naturally to those who do empirical social research – especially anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. They describe how business people behave in business, what codes corporations have and follow, what practices they engage in, what values they hold and whether they follow them, and how all of this varies from society to society as well as from firm to firm or industry to industry. Normative ethics, on the other hand, is interested in whether and how the norms or rules are justified, and how people in business as well as firms should act. In trying to determine the latter, those in philosophical business ethics turn primarily to the long tradition of ethics dating back to the Greeks and the theories that have emerged from two thousand years of discussion. Those trained in philosophy learn the techniques of moral evaluation and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches that are still viable and give the best account of what goes by the name of conventional morality. The function of theory is both to justify what is currently held by conventional morality that is justifiable and to critique those parts that are insufficiently justified or are unjustifiable, such as slavery.
Professor Werhane has done yeoman’s work in trying to unify the two approaches – the descriptive and the normative, not only in the Ethical Issues in Business volume through the use of cases, but also in her own work and through her collaboration in publications not only with other philosophers but with those working in descriptive ethics. She specifically deals with the issue in her article “The Normative/Descriptive Distinction in Methodologies of Business Ethics” (1994) where she argues that there is no purely empirical or purely normative methodology. In her work she also correctly maintains that business ethics is a multidisciplinary subject, and there is no one I know who has collaborated with more colleagues and in a greater number of areas. She has co-authored or co-edited volumes and papers with David Bevan, Norman Bowie, Martin Calkins, Joanne Ciulla, Kendall D’Andrade, Thomas Donaldson, Tom Dunfee, R. Edward Freeman, A.R. Gini, Kenneth Goodpaster, Michael Gorman, Laura Hartman, John McCall, Ann Mills, Dennis Moberg, David Ozar, Mollie Painter-Morland, James Post, Tara Radin, Mary Rorty, Alan Singer, Edward Spence, Laura Westra, and Regina Wolfe among others.
Although she has focused primarily on managerial business ethics, by the breadth of her publications she has shown that the boundaries of the field should not be narrowly drawn, and she has shown the relevance of work in business ethics to other areas, for example, engineering (e.g., Gorman et al., Ethical and Environmental Challenges to Engineering (2000)), health care (e.g. Spencer et al., Organization Ethics in Health Care (2000)), poverty (e.g., Hartman et al., Profitable Partnerships for Poverty Alleviation (2010)), leadership studies (e.g., Werhane and Painter-Morland, Leadership, Gender and Organization (2011)), feminism (e.g., Werhane et al., Women in Business (2007)), and corporate social responsibility (e.g., Carroll et al., Corporate Responsibility (2012)), among others.
It is clear that she has had a significant influence on the development of the field and the way the field is characterized. Just as clearly, however, the parameters of a field are not set by any one person and are not set once and for all. The field of business ethics is vibrant and continues to develop and evolve. The task of integrating normative and descriptive business ethics has really just begun, even though it has been an endeavor of Werhane’s and of others from the start. The emphasis on managerial ethics has been influenced by the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics with The Academy of Management and the cooperation with the Social Issues section of the Academy. The Society’s earlier cooperation with those in Legal Studies has not developed, and arguably too little attention has been paid by those in business ethics to ethics in finance, marketing, human resources, and other subareas of business. A few contacts have been made between those in engineering ethics, computer ethics, environmental ethics, and medical ethics, and so on, but those in business ethics too rarely pursue the many issues that overlap those areas and business ethics. And on the philosophical side, fewer and fewer of the philosophers in the field seem interested in pursuing the relevant topics in meta-ethics or in analyzing presuppositions of business practices or tackling large issues such as the justifiability of various new emerging aspects or kinds of capitalism and new aspects of globalization or in contributing to the discussion of the effects of climate change and the role of business in addressing the changes. Although, as Werhane points out, ethics is intrinsic to all business decisions, the broad view of the field is still too often a loose collection of topics rather than a systematic examination of business in all its interrelated aspects. Lacking also is a closer examination of business to politics and to political economy—issues dealt with more in Europe than in the United States. Werhane has helped keep the door open to all these and a host of other issues and perspectives. Despite what remains to be done, there is no longer any question about the existence or legitimacy of business ethics as an academic field and Werhane’s imprint on it is strong and lasting.
Moral Imagination, Mental Models and Systems Thinking
If one takes Google Scholars’ citation index as a marker of influence in the scholarly community, Werhane’s four most influential works are her book Moral Imagination and Managerial Decision-Making (1999) (534 citations), and her articles “Moral Imagination and Systems Thinking” (2002) (187 citations), “Mental Models, Moral Imagination and System Thinking in the Age of Globalization,” (2008) (100 citations), and “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in Management,” (1998) (104 citations). Even without Google Scholars those in the field know her work is closely linked to these concepts. Although she is not the first to use the terms, she uses them widely in her work, and has become identified with them the way some others in business ethics are associated with Kant or Aristotle. For moral imagination she acknowledges her debt to Mark Johnson’s Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993) although clearly she differs with him on some points and draws on Kant and a variety of other sources as well, including some from her earlier work on art and artistic imagination. For mental models and systems thinking she cites Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990), although again she builds on the work of a number of other philosophers, psychologists and social scientists.
In each case she makes the material her own and combines them in a compelling way. She is certainly correct that all three are important in moral judgment. The warnings she gives about avoiding being trapped in one’s mental model—for instance, accepting a model of business which excludes moral evaluation of its practices—is important, no matter what one’s preference for a specific model. The lack of moral imagination is a failure that frequently affects not only business people but some academic writers as well. The plague of restrictive mental models, of which R. Edward Freeman’s separation thesis is only one example, is a tricky and thorny problem facing any conscientious moral actor. How much am I being influenced by my background, prejudices, preconceptions, and the like? This is an important question to raise and not an easy one to answer, since we are often blind to other points of view and never seriously consider alternatives for views we think self-evident or clearly correct. Most difficult of all are mental models which we employ and don’t even realize that they are mental models which can be questioned and perhaps altered. The same is true of systems thinking. Moral dilemmas are often posed in case studies and faced in business which not only appear insoluble but are insoluble on the individual level. They are often the result of systemic problems or structures and require answers on a systemic level.
Werhane has done us all a service by emphasizing all three concepts and by clarifying what sometimes seems obvious once she calls our attention to them. In her writing she has carefully made some of the theoretical aspects of her elaboration of the concepts practically applicable by raising a number of questions that one should ask and considerations that one should take into account in approaching moral judgments. Thus, in making moral imagination operational she lists questions one should ask, e.g., “(1) Is this dilemma solvable given the parameters of the context, and extant ‘scripts’? (2) What are the possibilities that are not context-dependent? (3) Might we have to revamp the operative script to take into account new possibilities not within the scope of one’s particular situation or within one’s role in that situation?”; and considerations to be taken, e.g., “an awareness of the particular: the character, context, situation, event and dilemma at issue”, “envisioning possibilities that other reasonable but disengaged persons could envision too”, and “evaluating the status quo and newly formulated possibilities” (Werhane 1999, p. 121). They are all excellent questions and considerations. They exemplify what using moral imagination consists in.
Werhane is right that moral imagination is a necessary ingredient in all moral decision making. It is often ignored in discussions of moral analysis and cases. In some ways, however, she does not go far enough and in other ways she goes too far.
Her work is independent of any particular moral theory. And that strength tends to be a weakness because she doesn’t go far enough. If she is right that moral imagination is a necessary part of moral decision-making, then it has greater applicability then she realizes. She does not directly discuss its applicability to ethical theories and she sometimes seems to imply that moral imagination is distinct from them. It is not clear how far she follows Johnson in his attack on “Moral Law Folk Theory,” in which he includes the Judeo-Christian tradition, Kantian Rational Ethics, Utilitarian Reductionism, and all other kinds of what he calls absolutist theories (Johnson 1993, 13–31). The difficulty with many presentations of utilitarianism and of a Kantian approach, however, is precisely that they are presented as if moral imagination had no role to play in the analysis. While it is true, for instance, that Mill never mentions moral imagination, clearly one cannot perform a full moral utilitarian calculation without an abundance of moral imagination and without questioning our mental models3 as well as considering systemic dimensions when required. Utilitarianism requires that we consider all the effects of an action on all those affected by it, weighing the positive and negative consequences and striving for the greatest net preponderance of good. Obviously it requires, as Werhane insists, that all good moral judgments or decisions should consider all the details of the particular case. In this sense it starts with the particular. It quickly becomes clear that we must use our moral imagination if the act is one we are contemplating and is yet to be performed. We must imagine the consequences for each of those affected and the probability of their occurring. We must also consider alternative actions and see which produces the greatest excess of good over bad. Imagination is central and crucial. If we are considering how we should act or whether we should adopt a particular policy – e,g., outsourcing to China – how do we proceed? We have to imaginatively describe the possible consequences for all affected. That is no easy task. We must consider a wide variety of contingencies, including not only the consequences of the action for all those affected, but also how the action will appear and be appraised by the press, the government, our customers, the general public, U.S. suppliers, and so on. In each case we have to try to think like they do or would, not as we might wish they thought. This requires the empathy and sympathy that Werhane so persuasively discusses. We have to challenge the mind set of profits, include the important dimension of human rights, ask all the questions and take into account all the considerations that Werhane lists. We do not know exactly how Levi-Strauss made its decision, and we know that it initially decided to go into China and then decided to withdraw. The committee assigned with the task took a year (Werhane 1999, 24) to come to a decision (which was overruled by the CEO, Robert Haas). Surely it considered consequences, rights, different points of view—and rightly so. Those who use the utilitarian approach are often guilty of the pitfalls Werhane discusses. They limit the consequences they consider because of the constrained mental models they use in considering those affected and in weighing the real harm they suffer. At its worst, perhaps, the analysis turns into a cost-benefit analysis of the type Ford did with the Pinto. That is certainly not a utilitarian moral analysis. And Werhane is correct in pointing out that such an approach fails to use one’s moral imagination to think outside of the mind-set of corporate profit and loss. Yet the fact that it is often misused is not a defect of utilitarianism but of its users. Werhane herself seems to think so poorly of the approach that she calls Carl Kotchian’s self-serving rationalization of the Tri-Star scandal a utilitarian analysis.4 It was anything but, although he did selectively cite some consequences.
The same application of her views can be made to Kant’s categorical imperative. To think that it is an arid intellectual exercise is to miss Kant’s point. If we take the second formulation: treat people always as ends in themselves, never as a means only (or always treat them with respect) (Kant, p. 54)5 cannot be achieved without a good deal of moral imagination, including sympathy and empathy. Treating people with respect requires that you consider them seriously and not as abstract entities or disembodied minds. What it means may vary according to the situation, context and all the other considerations Werhane helpfully lists as being central to using moral imagination in moral judgments or decisions. What does it mean to treat this person in this circumstance and relation to me with respect? Would it appear as respect from that person’s point of view as the recipient of the action? I must of course know the nature of the society, its accepted norms of respect, and the meaning attached to a variety of actions. If in an Arab country how do I show respect to women and do I really show them respect if I discriminate against them in employment as local custom often dictates? All the questions Werhane suggests we should ask ourselves and all the considerations we should take into account clearly apply. Nor can we seriously apply them without sympathy and empathy.
What is true of the second formulation of the categorical imperative is equally true of the other two formulations. In the first formulation getting clear the true maxim on which we act requires insight into our true motivation and clarity about the action and how it will impact others.6 The act of universalizing the maxim clearly involves imagination and considering the action from a variety of points of view. In the third formulation7 we are autonomous, but in acting we are legislating for everyone—a daunting responsibility and one that stretches our imagination even further than Werhane’s analysis goes. The point is that her work with moral imagination, mental models and systems thinking may well be more important and more applicable to the literature of moral theory and psychology than she thinks.
Similarly, what is true of moral imagination applies as well to mental models. Both utilitarianism and deontology, properly used, provide a useful way to get people to break out of their mental models. They require objectivity, and suggest achieving that, as we have seen, by considering all those affected by an action, and considering what it means to treat all others with respect. One cannot consider only one’s company or only profits if the requirements of either approach are taken seriously. Discussions of mental models help one understand parts of the two methods and parts of the two methods help implement Werhane’s aim of helping people break out of restrictive mind-sets. Moreover, if we consider mental models as closed one perspective structures of thought we do them a disservice. Sometimes they are. But they need not be exclusive.
In discussing mental models Werhane uses the Challenger case as an example, contrasting, among others, the “think like an engineer” mental model and the “think like a manager” model. In both cases the assumption seems to be that they exclude moral imagination or a moral mental model (Werhane 1999, 52–62). The engineers did not blow the whistle at least in part because the role of the engineer is to make recommendations, while managers make decisions. What Werhane’s insights show, although she doesn’t say this, is that one can be an engineer with moral imagination and a manager with moral imagination. The (perhaps mistaken in Werhane’s view) hope of producing such people is why many engineering schools and business schools require a course in ethics. Nor is it clear, contrary to the statement by Lund in the scenario, that putting on a “managerial hat” is incompatible with a putting on an “engineering hat” (Werhane 1999, 59). People typically wear many hats and use many mental models and have many roles—a person can be a spouse, parent, American, member of a variety of social, political and religious organizations, a member of a profession, an employee of a company, and so on all at the same time. Although one can take a narrow view of any of them, doing so is not a requirement. Werhane’s position reminds us that the moral point of view need not be considered one more mental model or hat or point of view. It should inform all of them. In all of them moral imagination is appropriate and a necessary ingredient if one is to live a moral life.
Perhaps Werhane agrees.
In what sense does she go too far? In stating the aim of the book she says: “My aim is to develop some fresh insights on two simple questions: Why do ordinary, decent managers engage in questionable behavior? Why do successful companies ignore the ethical dimensions of their processes, decisions and actions? In what follows I argue that the missing element in many instances of alleged managerial or corporate wrongdoing is a simple phenomenon: moral imagination” (Werhane 1999, 6). She does a very good job of showing that lack of moral imagination has some explanatory power in some cases. On page 11 of Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, Werhane lists some of the many ways that individual managers and companies with ordinary moral sensibilities display a narrow perspective and little moral imagination. The difficulty is that she applies moral imagination and mental models to so many disparate cases that it is difficult to know when she is re-describing an event or case in terms of moral imagination and mental models and when she is making a causal claim such that they have real explanatory force.
She recounts many cases. The positive ones she says display moral imagination and breaking out of restrictive mind sets. In the negative ones the protagonists, if not motivated solely by greed or self-interest, suffer from a lack of moral imagination and restrictive mind-sets. Surely there are a host of other possible motivations. One can describe each case—and every other case—as she does. But then the explanatory force loses its power. If the claim is that these are the real causes, that it is an empirical claim. Then either it is falsifiable, or if it is not, then it is not very interesting if we are interested in real causes.
The cases of exemplary behavior—James Burke’s decision in the Johnson and Johnson Tylenol recall case, Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills, Merck and the river blindness case, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, the South Shore Bank in Chicago, and so on—are for Werhane all instances and exemplars of the use of moral imagination. She is undoubtedly correct that almost all readers will agree that these were morally admirable actions, perhaps supererogatory, even when the central actors speak in terms of following rules. In the case of Malden Mills Aaron Feuerstein tells us he was just following what his Jewish faith told him was his duty. One might describe what he did as an instance of moral imagination because he went against what his lawyer and financial advisors counseled. But he doesn’t describe it that way. Similarly James Burke says he followed the Johnson & Johnson Code and put the customers’ safety first. Again one can describe it as moral imagination, but that is not the way he describes it. He did what the Code required. The negative cases of the Ford Pinto, and the like, she describes as failures to use moral imagination. If this provides a causal explanation then it is, as I have said, an empirical question. But it seems unlikely that any one cause captures all the diverse cases. It is not always clear whether one is morally culpable for not using one’s moral imagination, although she does say in one case she does not want to be taken as implying the failure justifies the action.
The GE case is puzzling since in four of the five instances involving GE (Werhane 1999, 4–5) the perpetrators are guilty of illegal behavior. Perhaps they were morally blind or had moral amnesia (p. 7), but to claim they the GE managers acted as they did despite the law, and that they were legally blind, seems less plausible. They surely knew there were laws that governed their conduct and they surely knew they were subject to the law and liable to legal punishment if found guilty.
The case of the Challenger explosion seems to fit neatly neither into the positive nor the negative case category, and has elements of both. Werhanes’s description and discussion of it in both her book and in her articles trades on the reader drawing moral conclusions on their own. But the case is far from clear and calls for close ethical analysis.
Werhane gives the details of the case. It was, of course, a tragedy. Thiokol’s engineers had “determined that the behavior of the rubber O-ring material could not be predicted when atmospheric temperatures were below 30 degrees” (Werhane 1999, 48). The period before the launch at Cape Canaveral was particularly cold. At least 14 of the engineers protested the launch. A peculiar fact noted is that “the O-ring had never been tested below 47 degrees.” To a layman, it would seem that such testing is the responsibility of engineers who protested. Why hadn’t any tests been made? How does this bit of information mesh with the statement that the action of the O-ring could not be predicted below 30 degrees? Was that determined by tests? How many other components had not been tested below 47 degrees and so might also fail? Larry Mulloy, the manager of the solid rocket booster had decided that erosion detected in earlier launches “were accepted and indeed expected.” So there was a disagreement among the engineers. Management asked if the protesting engineers knew the O-rings would fail and they admitted they had no proof, but that they might. Might other components as well? Unless we know the answers to these questions it is difficult to know how to evaluate the case from a moral point of view.
Did management act unethically in deciding to go ahead with the launch? Was it their moral duty not to proceed if they weren’t sure whether the O-ring would fail? Their mind-set was influenced by the fact that they had 24 successful launches; but surely considering that fact is part of the total package of things to be considered in cases where complete information is not available. They certainly knew that there was always the possibility of failure, yet 24 successes does show the general reliability of the rocket. It is easy in hindsight to say they made a mistake. But were they morally blameworthy? If the launch had been successful, would they still have been morally blameworthy for the decision? It would be nice to have that discussion before we say the defect was lack of moral imagination. If they are blameworthy, then perhaps in saying they lacked moral imagination one could directly say they failed to recognize from a moral point of view it was obligatory not to launch if there was any risk that might be avoided by a delay and further experimentation.
In the story of the Challenger, Werhane notes that the engineers did not blow the whistle, even though they had the home telephone number of the CEO of Morton Thiokol (Werhane 1998, 233; Werhane 1999, 59). Did they have a moral obligation to blow the whistle? Werhane suggests that perhaps they were caught in their role of providers of data and not decision-makers. Her assumption seems to be that they should have blown the whistle. But that assumption, or intuition, is not self-evident and needs an argument to be persuasive. The story is too complicated to rely on one’s initial reaction to the actions of the engineers and to management as morally blind. Are any of the people in this case morally accountable for not using their moral imagination or for not thinking outside of their role and mental mind-set? Using Werhane’s approach, how does one decide?
Werhane has helpfully brought to our attention the importance of moral imagination, mental models and system thinking, and has illustrated their use in many of her writings. So perhaps my questions and objections are all beside the point for Werhane and miss her point. This leads us to Werhane’s view of morality and her method in doing normative ethics.
Normative Ethics without Moralizing
For Mark Johnson, morality is “a matter of how well or how poorly we construct (i.e., live out) a narrative that solves our problem of living a meaningful and significant life” (Johnson, 180). Arguably that is only one part of morality. He further says, speaking of moral theories that “Their purpose is not, and cannot be, to tell us the ‘right thing to do’ in different situations. They tell us rather, about the nature of moral problems, moral reasoning, and moral understanding” (Johnson, 188). Again that is one view. That it is the only correct view is more than he shows. Where Werhane stands on the nature of morality is not entirely clear. But whatever it is, the task of integrating her insights into other theories and developing their relations are tasks that others can undertake as well as she.
One view of normative business ethics sees it as essentially prescriptive. Some practitioners are Kantians, some are utilitarians, some are Aristotelians, some are pluralists, some are relativists, and so on. Consequentialist approaches (especially utilitarianism), deontological approaches that emphasize duty, and virtue approaches are each in some ways intuitive and capture part of everyone’s moral experience. Whichever approach one takes, there is a tendency on the part of some to reduce moral theories to a set of rules or principles to be applied almost thoughtlessly, or to be chosen to rationalize one’s actions. They can be seen as options from which to choose according to one’s inclinations or predilections, asserting that there is really no way to rationally choose among them. After all, one might argue, noted philosophers are to be found on all sides, and elegant arguments have been devised to show the shortcomings of each proffered theory. If the experts can’t agree, how can non-philosophers, students, or the ordinary business person be expected to navigate the shoals of ethical theory? Given that impression of ethical theory, it is not surprising that the standard approaches are often poorly used and turn into wooden caricatures of what the theories actually hold.
Werhane does not clearly choose any specific approach in her applied work in the field, although she has written a fair amount on rights and justice. Her moral analysis, as she convincingly shows, always involves moral imagination, and often requires breaking out of tunnel vision and exclusively business models and values in business transactions, and frequently involves systems considerations for real solutions to ethical problems, dilemmas or deficiencies.
Based on the major portion of her publications I shall call Werhan’e approach to business ethics “normative ethics without moralizing.” By moralizing I mean coming to a moral conclusion and saying that, whatever the action or policy is, “X is morally wrong and should not be done, or X is morally required and should be done.”8 Most actions that people perform in and out of business are ones that are morally permitted but not required. There seems to be a growing trend in the literature of business ethics to adopt the view that one does not judge actions from a moral point of view. Authors tend not to argue that actions they describe are unethical or immoral. Rather, following Werhane’s approach, they describe the action, and although it is clear that they think the action wrong, they do not say so. The assumption seems to be that any right thinking moral person, as the reader is expected to be, will see that this is the case.
We have seen some of the questions and considerations Werhane says moral imagination and broadening our mental models involve. One might argue that lacking is any guidance as to what to do with one’s answers. Perhaps asking for this would be to fail to understand the non-moralizing component of the method. The people in the scenarios or the readers who are making a decision are assumed not to be evil, uncaring self-seekers, but ordinary decent people who know what common morality expects, who as Adam Smith holds, have natural sympathy for their fellowmen. Preaching to them is not what is required; nor is teaching them the method of utilitarianism or deontology, since those produce arguments that are rarely effective emotively or in practice. If people can be brought to use their moral imaginations, they will come to see the right way to act, which may or may not be sufficient to motivate them to so act. Since sometimes it is not, it is useful pragmatically for a company to state rules and principles and for states to pass laws.
Her approach combines the normative and the descriptive. Her emphasis on beginning with the particular, with cases and issues situated in a context, puts a good deal of focus on the descriptive, as does her reliance on the notion of the moral minimums and of common morality. These are norms that are widely accepted, not inventions or deductions made by philosophers sitting in their armchairs. In that sense her notion of norms is empirically based. They are not eternal truths and develop over time, usually becoming larger in their scope and acceptance, but sometimes being challenged and revised. The UN Declaration of human rights is not a statement of eternal truths but a statement of moral ideals that have been endorsed by the vast majority of nations, even though there is some disagreement about their content and applicability. Normativity is built into our social and business practices and not something added. We can and do hold people accountable, but we can also try to understand and make sense of why good people do bad things.
There are practical applications of this approach. One clear one is teaching. As we have seen, Werhane uses a great many examples of corporate actions, both praiseworthy or illegal and, one infers, unethical. The re-descriptions Werhane provides serve a good pedagogical purpose, namely to explain and highlight moral imagination, even if and when they are not factually causal descriptions. All cases can be re-described in this way, and in doing so Werhane illustrates her approach. Using this model of moral analysis places less emphasis on techniques of moral reasoning (although she says that one should be able to give one’s reasons in justifying one’s behavior) and more on examining possibilities and stimulating and developing the moral imagination of one’s students and employees. It supplies a research agenda for those interested in determining the most effective way to develop the moral imagination of students and of employees and managers. It suggests areas to be tested to determine which rules or generalizations are most effective in changing behavior for the better based on making moral imagination central. And, as I have already suggested, it can also be used by those who are wedded to moral theories to interpret them more amply by incorporating attention to moral imagination.
Finally, as Werhane repeats often, arguments using moral theory are rarely persuasive. If our aim is to change behavior we need either something more or something different. One answer is to inspire through stories. Another is to show companies that they can do well by doing good. In fact this latter strategy is the one that she frequently adopts. She uses it in arguing against bribery, discrimination, sweatshops and other practices, and she uses it positively to encourage companies to help in poverty alleviation by taking advantage of profitable partnerships that give them access to the vast number of people at the bottom of the pyramid (Hartman et al. 2008, 37–46).9
Werhane’s pointing out new ways of approaching problems without moralizing is laudable and certainly an approach that resonates with many in business and in business ethics. Yet it is a mistake to think that those who argue for certain actions as being right and others wrong are moralizing. By presenting reasons for their positons they also present readers with possibilities. On disputed questions perhaps the greatest service those in normative business ethics can serve is to clarify and sharpen the issue and then provide the best possible defense of opposing positions, concluding with an overall assessment. Often this involves one person arguing for A, and an opponent trying to show the shortcomings of the argument. This is not an idle exercise and it need not end in a stalemate or in a “pick either side” conclusion. Sometimes actions are indeed wrong and can be shown to be wrong. The arguments against bribery are so strong that almost all countries have laws against it. The arguments against slavery have proven to be sound, despite figures going back to Aristotle who have given defenses of it. Arguments are not always motivating. More is needed. The interrelation of argument and imagination appears to be ripe for mining, and I suggest that that interrelation is one worth pursuing, investigating, and even arguing about.
It is not clear exactly how Werhane wishes to incorporate ethical theories or even common morality into her moral decisions despite her discussion of moral reasoning in her book (Werhane 1999, 118–126). She insists that we begin with the individual contextualized case. That seems to be a very good starting point in many cases. However, a beginning implies a middle and an end. She never tells us what the end might be or how to get there. She says, “We need to give reasons, good reasons, for our intuitions (Rest 1988),” and then “. . . Aristotle, Kant, Mills [sic], Rawls and even Marx give us ammunition with which to hone our reasoning skills, and thus (admittedly only sometimes) help us convince others of the merits of these intuitions and judgments.”(Werhane 2006, 45). Moral theories seem to have a place, and I believe a larger one than simply providing ways of giving reasons to other people for one’s decisions rather than simply citing one’s intuitions. One of them is helping individuals and corporations think through moral issues on their own. Werhane distinguishes moral imagination from moral reasoning (Werhane 1999, 13) but the closest we get to a larger discussion of moral reasoning seems to end with using stipulative principles or moral minimum standards (Werhane 1999, 123–136).
Although moral imagination is a necessary part of all moral evaluation, this should not be taken to mean we do not know what is right and wrong in most everyday situations. The famous cases Werhane cites are not the sort of choices managers face every day in all their decisions. We should always be alert to moral temptations and pitfalls, but most people in most of their daily activities live good lives without much moral reflection because it is simply not required. They know not to steal, hurt others, falsify documents and the like. When faced with signing a document or filling an order or doing routine work only rarely does one come up against a moral judgment requiring a full analysis, a questioning of our mind set and the other ways moral imagination works. Careful moral consideration and analysis are probably required more often than most of us realize; but it is time-consuming and not something that seems required many times a day, even though we make many decisions a day. All this is compatible with Werhane’s approach. However, in the difficult cases much of the work that those who champion the use of moral theories do is done for her by the notions of moral minimums,10 tradition, customary morality, natural sympathy or empathy, a basic sense of justice and a balancing similar to reflective equilibrium. The bone of contention is whether these are up to the task.
Business ethics is a practical discipline. When faced with a difficult or complicated moral issue, most often a moral decision has to be made: is the action right or wrong, should I do it or shouldn’t I? In making the decision one always takes a moral risk. One might be mistaken, and no judgment, as Werhane insists, can claim to be eternally true or infallible. But that is not what moral theories, insofar as they give us something like decision procedures, try to give us. In difficult cases they help us make moral decisions here and now, and are generally better than having us guess or relying on undefended or unexamined intuitions. Werhane’s position, I suggest, can be strengthened by explicitly incorporating the standard approaches provided by ethical theory, rather than–as she seems to do--proceeding without them.
Analyzing actions from a moral point of view and coming to a conclusion as to their moral valence should not be confused with judging individuals who perform these actions. The initial analysis gives us only what W. D. Ross calls a prima facie obligation, and cases involve all things considered obligations. Determining the morality of an action can and should be distinguished from morally judging the blameworthiness of the actors, as the existence of excusing conditions reminds us.
Hence, as I argued earlier, one need not consider moral imagination, mental models, and systems thinking as standing in opposition to the standard approaches to moral reasoning. They are not only compatible, but they can also be said to be mutually reinforcing. One can use utilitarianism or Kant’s categorical imperative to argue that a particular action is prima facie morally right or wrong, and yet not engage in moralizing. Part of the reason for teaching these approaches is to promote, not restrict, an individual’s moral autonomy. If individuals follow helpful suggestions and asks the questions involved in freeing their moral imagination, they may wish to think through an issue or dilemma on their own and arrive at their own reasoned and justified position. That common morality or moral minimums provide the answer is not always the case, and sometimes one may question parts of common morality. One cannot, as Werhane rightly says, do it from nowhere. It will always be positioned and situated. But that does not mean tried and true approaches to the problem—consider everyone, consider real effects on real people, and treat everyone with respect--cannot be useful in thinking through cases to a moral conclusion.
What ethical theories do is flesh out these requirements and systematically consider them. They provide reasons one can give to others to justify one’s actions, but even more important they provide guidelines for individuals figuring out the answers for themselves, taking into account their moral intuitions, but also those of others. In addition, by making the argument available to others they open them up to scrutiny, criticism, refutation, rebuttal, and counter proposals. This is not moralizing but the way moral progress is socially made. In fact, one might argue that one of the functions of those in normative business ethics is not to show that stealing is wrong—which is an obvious truism—but to help businesses think through complicated moral issues in business. Analyses of corruption, exploitation, child labor, workers rights, obligations of pharmaceutical companies in drug production and delivery, the legitimacy of operating in destabilized countries, or in countries known for political oppression or human rights violations are all issues that are more complicated than they first appear. Careful analysis of who is affected and how and how one is to weigh the pros and cons on these and many other issues are topics those in normative business ethics have turned some attention to and arguably they have added to the clarity of the ongoing discussion of the moral conclusions companies draw in general and in particular cases. No one likes moralizing, and Werhane’s ethics-without-moralizing approach satisfies that requirement. But normative ethical theory should not be dismissed, as Johnson seems to, because it is supposedly obsessed with rules and rationality and in some ways undercuts moral autonomy or restricts moral imagination, or, as Werhane seems to hold, because it is rarely motivating and often, in her view, unhelpful.
Conclusion
I started by saying it would be difficult to exaggerate Werhane’s contributions to the academic side of business ethics. The reason should now be clear. She helped start the field, guide its formation and development, and nurture it as it matured. During its forty or so year history she has been indefatigable in contributing to the field through her research, teaching and service on a variety of levels—local, national and international. She has developed a distinctive approach in her research. The anthology that she and Donaldson edited (and the anthology edited by Beauchamp and Bowie), as the first in the area of business ethics, contributed to defining the field and were path breaking in a way that the anthologies that followed could not be. Later anthologies added dimensions and innovations; but the road had already been paved. By default, no matter how good they were, each of them became one more addition to a rapidly growing number of anthologies. The Society for Business Ethics and the Business Ethics Quarterly have graduated to the position of being established institutions in the field, likely to change but not disappear. Being first to a field and staying on as an active contributor along a host of dimensions, and continuously making significant contributions over a long period of time creates an impact that those who come later cannot hope to achieve. Although Werhane’s approach to business ethics in her publications is not the only way of doing or approaching normative business ethics, she serves as a model for many, and her work stimulates new ideas even among her critics. Patricia Werhane has made a lasting and important imprint on the field of business ethics for which we are all indebted to her.