The Good Manager – A Moral Manager?

In this article two problems with the recently developed "practice or virtue approach" to business ethics are discussed. The first problem concerns an alleged harmony between common demands of morality (generally understood) and the internal goods of actual business practice. The claimed h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics
Main Author: Sundman, Per (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2000
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2000, Volume: 27, Issue: 3, Pages: 247-254
Further subjects:B Actual Practice
B Good Manager
B Business Ethic
B Moral Reasoning
B Economic Growth
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Description
Summary:In this article two problems with the recently developed "practice or virtue approach" to business ethics are discussed. The first problem concerns an alleged harmony between common demands of morality (generally understood) and the internal goods of actual business practice. The claimed harmony is strong in essence since it holds that the role expectations a good manager has to live up to, do in fact coincide with what morality demands. The second problem is related to the first and concerns the alleged relevance of a virtue perspective for business ethics. According to the virtue perspective discussed in this article, moral reasoning should take actual practice, and only actual practice, as a point of departure. In so doing ethics is claimed to become insulated from e.g. putting irrelevant demands on practitioners. Such demands are understood as based on abstract principles alien to the practice in question. The thesis of this article is that neither of the above mentioned two claims are plausible. This is so basically because one needs to turn elsewhere than to actual business practice in order to detect a morally laden notion of managerial goodness.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1023/A:1006229606707