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Ranken on Disharmony and Business Ethics
Author(s) -
GIBSON KEVIN
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of applied philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.339
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5930
pISSN - 0264-3758
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5930.1989.tb00394.x
Subject(s) - morality , moral agency , analogy , harmony (color) , agency (philosophy) , business ethics , sociology , moral philosophy , environmental ethics , epistemology , philosophy of business , form of the good , law and economics , philosophy , law , political science , management , social science , economics , business model , art , visual arts
This article is a response to Nani Ranken's paper ‘Morality in business: disharmony and its consequences’ ( Journal of Applied Philosophy , Vol. 4, p. 41). There she attacked the analogy sometimes made between businesses and persons, and concluded that businesses cannot be regarded as moral agents. Her thesis relies centrally on a very strict notion of a person's ‘true good’. By exploring and expanding the concepts of ‘true good’ and ‘moral agency’ we are able to recover a sense in which businesses are indeed members of the moral community. Moreover, admitting businesses to the moral community also provides a working framework to examine the claim that what is good for business is in harmony with the dictates of morality.