Organizational Ethics and the Good Life (The ^ARuffin Series in Business Ethics) - Softcover

Hartman, Edwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195100778 ISBN 13: 9780195100778

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

In this book, Edwin Hartman argues that the real world of experience, rather than abstract theory, is the source of principles for business ethics. Hartman explains how ethical principles derive from what employees learn in good organizations and argues that an ethically good company is one that creates the good life for those who work in it. An ethical organization has a good corporate culture, which not only serves the interests of the participants but helps determine what those interests are, and sees to it that they are compatible with both autonomy and good corporate citizenship. In this way the individual develops a conception of the good life what is inappropriate to the moral person. The influences on Hartmans thought include the Aristotelian tradition of refined common sense, contemporary pragmatism, recent work concerning collective action problems, and social contract theory.

About this title

About the Author

Edwin Hartman is Professor in the Faculty of Management and the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

From the Back Cover

In Organizational Ethics and the Good Life, Edwin Hartman contends that, as ethics is about the good community, a great part of business ethics is about the good organization. He argues that a large and complex organization has the characteristic of the "commons" studied by game theorists, and that it is the task of management to preserve the commons in the long-term interests of all its members, principally by creating an appropriate corporate culture. A good corporate culture not only serves the interests of the participants but makes the organization a place in which they can develop interests that are compatible with both autonomy and good corporate citizenship: that is, they can develop a sense of the good life that is appropriate to the moral person. Hartman opposes the standard view that the study of organizational ethics is a matter of considering how certain foundational ethical principles apply in organizational settings; instead, he argues, business ethicists should consider how free and rational people arrive at a consensus on practical ethical principles in a morally good organization that leaves room for moral progress. And what makes an organization morally good? In discussing justice, loyalty, and other features of a morally good organization, Hartman draws largely on the work of Rawls and Hirschman. In describing the good life as one in which well-being and morality overlap, Hartman proposes a new version of an idea as old as Aristotle, who taught that human beings are rational but also irreducibly communal creatures.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195100778
• ISBN 13: 9780195100778
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232