No More Lemmings, Please – Reflections on the Communal Authority Thesis

A key feature of ISCT is the claim that individuals are required to comply with the norms that are “accepted by a clear majority of the community as standing for an ethical principle” [Donaldson and Dunfee, 1999, The Ties that Bind (Harvard Business School Press, Boson, MA), p. 39], so long as these...

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Главный автор: Hussain, Waheed (Автор)
Формат: Электронный ресурс Статья
Язык:Английский
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Опубликовано: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2009
В: Journal of business ethics
Год: 2009, Том: 88, Выпуск: 4, Страницы: 717-728
Другие ключевые слова:B Communitarianism
B Hayek
B Consent
B ISCT
B Habermas
B Cultural Relativism
B author- ity
B social contracts
B Social norms
Online-ссылка: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Итог:A key feature of ISCT is the claim that individuals are required to comply with the norms that are “accepted by a clear majority of the community as standing for an ethical principle” [Donaldson and Dunfee, 1999, The Ties that Bind (Harvard Business School Press, Boson, MA), p. 39], so long as these norms are consistent with hypernorms. I refer to this as the communal authority thesis. Many people see the communal authority thesis as an attractive feature of ISCT, a welcome move away from the abstraction of principle-based ethical theories. I argue in this article, however, that the communal authority thesis is false: we do not have a general moral obligation to comply with the accepted norms in our community. I consider and reject several defenses of the communal authority thesis, including the central arguments put forward by Donaldson and Dunfee. I go on to develop my own position, which accepts that social norms can be important from the moral point of view. However, I argue that social norms are important because they can shape the morally important features of our situation, not because we have a general obligation to comply with these norms as such. I use examples such as gift giving in Japan and the housing crisis to illustrate my position.
ISSN:1573-0697
Второстепенные работы:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-009-0328-1