Business Ethics Journal Review

Alan Tomhave and Mark Vopat have argued that organized boycotts against the expressive acts of companies and their leaders are pro tanto morally wrong because they constitute an attempt to silence voices in the marketplace of ideas. I argue that such boycotts are not best viewed as attempts to silence, but rather as a morally permissible form of withdrawal of support of certain expressive acts.

Kenneth Silver (2019) criticizes our (Sollars and Tuluca 2018) use of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to determine the return on investment that is deserved by shareholders, and suggests shareholder primacy follows from the principal/agent model, rather than a concern for risk. We argue that Silver has misunderstood CAPM and our use of it, and that, under current law, more is required from articles of incorporation or corporate bylaws for the principal/agent model to apply to corporations.

Joseph Heath states that our paper “misinterpret[s]” and so misrepresents his account. The present Commentary corrects the record. Our paper (Cohen and Peterson 2019) outlined Heath’s account on his own terms; it explained that Heath distances himself from consequentialism. But then we argued that Heath is mistaken and so offered a repaired version of the market failures approach. Our central concern, in the original paper and in this short Commentary, is showing that the economic argument for markets is at the same time ethical, and then being more precise about the ethical consideration that does the work.

Hühn and Dierksmeier argue that a better understanding of Adam Smith’s work would improve business ethics research and education. I worry that their approach encourages two scholarly sins. First, anachronistic historiography in which we distort Smith’s ideas by making him answer questions about contemporary debates in CSR theory. Second, treating him as a prophet by assuming that finding out what Smith would have thought about it is the right way to answer such questions.

Shareholders assume risk by investing. Sollars and Tuluca (2018) argue that while this does not justify a managerial policy of shareholder wealth maximization, it does justify compensating shareholders at the often-calculated cost of equity—the cost that investors require given the level of risk they assume. Here, I show that this can be unfair if the cost of equity is unfair. I then show how shareholder wealth maximization as a managerial imperative is better justified on other grounds.

Daniel Sportiello argues that my support of financial planning as a MacIntyrean practice fails because I have misunderstood the concept of internal goods, and because financial planning then has no internal good at all. Here, I rebut those charges.

Moriarty argues that the Market Failures Approach (MFA) to business ethics is inapplicable to “real world” problems, because it treats “market failure” as a failure to achieve Pareto efficiency. Depending upon how it is applied, Pareto efficiency is either trivially easy to satisfy or else so demanding that no real-world market could ever satisfy it. In this Commentary, I argue that Moriarty overstates these difficulties. The regulatory structure governing markets is best understood as an attempt to maximize the number of Pareto-improving exchanges that occur. There is no reason to think business self-regulation cannot be guided by the same normative-conceptual framework.

Etye Steinberg has recently raised a problem for Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach. In this paper we consider a response by Heath. We argue that Heath’s response not only leaves the original problem intact, but also raises a second one, analogous to stakeholder theory’s so-called “identification problem.”

Brennan and Jaworski (2018) accuse me of misunderstanding their thesis and failing to produce a counterexample to it. In this Response, I clarify my central argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love,” explain why I used prostitution as an example, and work to advance the debate.

In “The Case for Investment Advising,” Keith Wyma argues that investment advising is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a “practice”—that is, it is an activity marked by what MacIntyre calls an “internal good.” In this Commentary, though, I argue that Wyma seriously misunderstands what internal goods are.

In “The Responsibilities and Role of Business in Relation to Society,” Nien-hê Hsieh challenges Joseph Heath’s “market failure” or Paretian approach to business ethics by arguing for a “Back to Basics” approach. Here, I argue that two basics of Hsieh’s three-basics vision are flawed, because a. ordinary morality is in fact not sufficient for the adversarial realm of the market, and b. the ideal of a Pareto-optimal market economy with perfect competition does in fact provide an adequate basis for normative rules against market failures.

Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral virtues are antithetical to what is required of those who trade in financial markets to succeed. MacIntyre focuses on four virtues and argues that successful traders possess none of them: (i) self-knowledge, (ii) courage, (iii) taking a long-term perspective, and (iv) tying one’s own good with some set of common goods. By contrast, I argue that (i)–(iii) are, in fact, traits of successful traders, regardless of their normative assessment. The last trait – caring about the common good – is often counterproductive in most for-profit ventures, including trading, and so singling out traders is inappropriate.

In his thoughtful Commentary on my article, “Should Corporations Have the Right to Vote? A Paradox in the Theory of Corporate Moral Agency,” Kenneth Silver incorrectly asserts that I endorse (i) Robert Dahl’s Principle of Affected Interests and (ii) social contract theory. To the extent that Silver’s criticism of my argument is based on the claim that I appeal to either theory as the ground for my claim that corporate moral agency entails a corporate right to vote, it is misguided. I rely only on the Rawlsian equal participation principle that invests those subject to the law with the right to vote. To the extent Silver’s criticism is directed to that assertion, it is on point.

Jacob Sparks critiques our recent work on commodification by arguing that purchasing love indicates one has defective preferences. We argue A) it is possible to purchase these things without having defective preferences, B) Sparks has not shown that acting such defective preferences is morally wrong, C) that Sparks’ misunderstands the Brennan–Jaworski Thesis, and so has not produced a counterexample to it, and finally D) that when we examine the processes by which love is gifted, it is unclear whether these processes should be preferred.

Comer and Schwartz argue that the business ethics course should aim to cultivate moral courage within our students. Essential to their argument is the use of fictional exemplars of moral courage to motivate our students. I argue that the classroom, even when supplemented by good fiction, is not the right context by which to practice moral courage—the habituation of moral courage requires a context of risk. I suggest a virtue that can be practiced in the classroom—intellectual courage. By aiming at this virtue, we will also get the virtue of moral courage.

Many proponents of corporate agency take corporations to be responsible for their conduct, but few take them to merit rights over and above the rights of their members. Hasnas (2016) argues that, given a widely-held view of liberal political theory, corporate agency entails that corporations should have the right to vote. In response, I show that there are problems in appealing to liberal political theory, and that the view of voting Hasnas actually endorses need not be accepted. Should it be, however, the implications go far beyond the right to vote.

Welch and Ly register three objections to my argument that the Rawlsian paradigm offers no resources for formulating a normative theory of corporate governance. In this brief response, I note that while I agree with the first of these objection, I don’t think it poses any serious trouble to my argument; the other two objections, on the other hand, I am less convinced by. I then offer two alternative strategies for bringing Rawls to bear on business ethics, which don’t involve trying to apply his principles of justice to the corporation. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on why people are so insistent on talking about Rawls in the first place.

James Stacey Taylor claims that my argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love” is both incomplete and doomed to fail. I grant some of Taylor’s points, but remind him that semiotic objections to the commodification of certain goods are strongest when we think not about individual market transactions, but about what it means for a society to support the market in question.

Jeffrey Moriarty argues that unequal pay for employees who do the same work is not necessarily wrong, but can be wrong if it is discriminatory or deceptive. Moriarty does this in part by stressing that pay should be considered primarily as a price for labor and therefore that our views on price discrimination and unequal pay should mirror each other. In this critique, I argue that Moriarty fails to adequately account for the expressive functions of pay. A pluralist view of pay reveals otherwise overlooked normative concerns regarding pay and cautions against adopting too strong of an analytical connection between price discrimination and unequal pay.

While accepting and welcoming our main thesis and project, Schäfer and Hühn’s Commentary on our paper focuses on two main criticisms, both of which seem to us mistaken. The first of these is that our paper falsely argues “that the existing definitions of leadership out there fall short in describing the role of ethics in leadership.” The second seems to be a belief that (i) we claim to be offering an entirely new definition of leadership and misrepresenting its nature because (ii) in the view of Schäfer and Hühn this supposedly new definition “is essentially un-Aristotelian.”