Business Ethics Journal Review

David Bevan and Patricia Werhane try to enlist Adam Smith’s support in countering the neoclassical narrative in business ethics and CSR. While I applaud their goal and also completely agree with their argument that Smith has been radically misinterpreted by the economics mainstream, I am not completely in agreement with how they argue. In short, I believe they also have uprooted Adam Smith and transformed him in parts into a 20th century philosopher. The 18th century Adam Smith would be a much more powerful advocate for ethics in business if he were accepted as the very eclectic 18th century philosopher that he was.

Douglas May, Matthew Luth, and Catherine Schwoerer, identify and study an area that lacks empirical research, namely the effectiveness of teaching, and learning, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability. The authors assess whether courses that teach ethical decision-making in business settings positively influence students’ moral efficacy, moral meaningfulness, and moral courage. Their findings demonstrate increases in the ethics education treatment group’s outcomes for each of the three variables. This experimental data is encouraging, but the definitional subjectivity of each variable, and the unique effects of various methods of instruction, should provide motivation for further research efforts.

Pavlovich and Krahnke’s inclusion of neurological and psychological evidence to support organizational connectedness should be lauded. Unfortunately, we suggest a more fine-grained reading of the literature does not support their claim that empathy is critical to dissolving boundaries between employees and increasing altruism.

Steinbauer et al. (2014) examine how ethical leadership leads to improved moral judgment, and the role of followers’ perceived accountability and self-leadership. In this Commentary, I offer two critiques. First, I argue that the relationship that Steinbauer et al. propose between ethical leadership and self-leadership contains internal contradictions. Second, I argue that ethical leadership can have undesirable consequences for moral judgment and that self-leadership requires substantial freedom from an external authority. Thus, my arguments focus on Steinbauer et al.’s understanding of self-leadership and moral judgment in relation to ethical leadership.