Table of Contents
Week 1
Crane chapter 3 (2019)
A new model for ethical leadership, Bazerman (2020)
The Moral Machine Experiment, Awad et. al., (2018)
Week 2
Crane chapter 4 (2019)
How Ethical are you? Banji, Bazerman and Chugh (2003)
Ethics and Effectiveness: the nature of good leade...
Summaries articles and slides of Ethics and the Future of Business (general part)
Table of Contents
Week 1 .................................................................................................................................................... 2
Crane chapter 3 (2019)........................................................................................................................ 2
A new model for ethical leadership, Bazerman (2020) ....................................................................... 9
The Moral Machine Experiment, Awad et. al., (2018) ...................................................................... 10
Week 2 .................................................................................................................................................. 13
Crane chapter 4 (2019)...................................................................................................................... 13
How Ethical are you? Banji, Bazerman and Chugh (2003) ................................................................ 19
Ethics and Effectiveness: the nature of good leadership, Ciulla (2020) ............................................ 21
Week 3 .................................................................................................................................................. 26
The evolutionary bases for sustainable behavior: implications for marketing, policy and social
entrepreneurship, Griskevicius, Cantú and van Vugt (2021) ............................................................ 26
Social entrepreneurship: research as disciplined exploration, Mair (2020) ..................................... 29
Creating shared value, Porter (2011) ................................................................................................ 33
Five-step approach to stakeholder engagement, BSR (2019) ........................................................... 37
Week 4 .................................................................................................................................................. 43
Beyond GDP: measuring and achieving global genuine progress, Kubiszewksi et. al. (2013) .......... 43
Towards the circular economy, EMF (2013) ..................................................................................... 46
Climate change, summary for policymakers, IPCC (2021) ................................................................ 50
The triple layered business model canvas: a tool to design more sustainable business models,
Joyce and Paquin (2016).................................................................................................................... 53
,Week 1
Crane chapter 3 (2019)
First, a few definitions:
- Morality: human’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong
- Ethics: the systematic study of morality
- Ethical Theories: principles and rules that determine right and wrong in different situations
- Normative ethics: ethical theories that aim to prescribe the morally correct way of acting
(rules, guidelines, principles and approaches that determine right and wrong). So, how we
ought to behave.
- Descriptive morality: code of conduct adopted by a particular group or society.
- Descriptive ethics: ethical theories that describe how we actually behave (from a more
psychological standpoint).
Ethics in general are an on-going discussion about morality with a very long history. They typically
examine right and wrong from a human being perspective (anthropocentric) instead of for instance,
a nature perspective. Key questions in ethics include: what kind of moral principles guide our
actions? What kind of aims should we have? Ethical theories can give contradictory solutions to the
same problem.
Business ethics is the study of business situations, activities and decisions where issues of right and
wrong are addressed. Challenges include:
- Comprehensive: addressing challenging questions at the individual, organizational and
societal levels.
- Cross disciplinary: philosophy, management, economics, political, sustainability etc.
- Abstract nature: practical implications of ethical theories can be ambiguous.
- Critical thinking: don’t take the theories and related practices as a given
- Experience: in business can be helpful.
Law and ethics are partly overlapping but: 1) the law does not cover all ethical issues, 2) not all legal
issues are ethical, 3) law and ethics can involve contradictions.
Ethical absolutism: claims that there are eternal, universally applicable moral principles. Right and
wrong are objective qualities that can be rationally determined, irrespective of the circumstances.
Ethical realism claims that morality is context-dependent and subjective. No universal rights, it
depends on traditions, convictions and practices (culturally determined). NOTE: ethical realism is
different from descriptive realism in the way that descriptive realism suggests that different groups
have different ethics and ethical realism proposes that both sets of beliefs can be equally right (this is
still a normative theory).
Ethical pluralism allows an important openness and sensitivity to new realities. It’s a combination of
absolutism and realism.
Traditional western modernist ethical theories → absolutists: universal principles
Contemporary ethical theories → relativistic: provide alternative perspectives.
Religion also still plays a role in business ethics nowadays. The main difference between ethics form
religion and ethics from philosophy is that religion relies on faith to act ethically, and philosophy
,relies on rationality to act ethically. Also, with religious people there is the spiritual consequence of
going to hell if you do something unethical sooooo… yea. Luckily, normative ethical theories (based
on philosophical principles) remain at the cornerstone of business ethics for much of contemporary
business.
Okay, so, when talking normative ethical theories, we are talking about principles vs. outcomes
(consequences):
Consequentialist theories (like ethical egoism and utilitarianism) focus on the GOAL. This means
when the outcome is desirable, it is morally right. Moral judgement is based on the intended
outcomes, aims and goals. For the nerds that had this before (in hotelschool for example): these
theories are also known as teleological.
Principle based theories (like ethics of duties and rights and justice) focus on what is right rather
than what is desirable. This means that they look at the desirability of the principles you use to get to
a certain outcome, based on these principles, they deduce a ‘duty’ to act accordingly in a given
situation, regardless of the desirability of the consequences. Again, for the nerds: this is also called
deontological.
CONSEQUENTIALIST THEORIES:
1. Ethical egoism: focus on the self-interest of the decision maker. An action is morally right if
in the given situation the decision-maker freely decides in order to pursue their (short-term)
desires or their (long-term) interests. Some of the authors mentioned:
- Thomas Hobbes: without strong preventive measures, in a state of nature (society without
systems, controls or government) anarchy and chaos will prevail. According to him, it was in
everyone’s self-interest to be governed by some impartial rules.
- Ayn Rand: individualism is at the heart of every human being, we are all responsible for our
own happiness and self-development. She promoted the idea of a virtue of selfishness.
- Adam Smith: defended capitalism and the free market. He believed in freedom and
cooperation to ensure flourishing. This resulted in the promotion of the public good, as long
as there are sufficient rules to protect the public, and that we can each participate in a
coherent society.
- Milton Friedman: defended capitalism and the free market. He said it is the responsibility of
the business leader to fulfil fiduciary duties to shareholders “the business of business is
business”.
→ Friedman and Smith are not so much a cold egoistic approach as Hobbes and Rand, but a
little more social in nature.
, Egoism vs. selfishness: egoism can be moved by the pity for others, while a selfish person is
insensitive to another. Example: egoism is donating to a charity to improve your reputation.
Selfishness would be investing the money in yourself and ignoring the charity.
enlightened egoism: investing in the social environment to benefit yourself. Supporting
schools so you will get more knowledgeable employees. It focuses on the long-term human
interests
Weaknesses of Ethical Egoism: Adem’s Smiths free market is supposed to ensure that no
individual egoist pursues their own interest at another egoist’s expense. However, there are
market failures, like growing income inequality and the consequences of climate change, that
cause the egoism of single actors to lead to unfavorable results. This concludes that:
- Ethical Egoism can’t be a moral theory: it is internally inconsistent → each person pursues
their own self-interest and must accept that others do too, despite the fact that this is not in
their own self-interest, “anything goes” (you still here?). For this reason, Ethical egoism is not
consistently accepted as a legit approach to ethics.
2. Utilitarianism: implies the “greatest happiness principle”, an act is morally right if it results in
the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people affected by the action. So,
instead of focusing on the individual (ethical egoism) it focuses on the collective. Important
authors were:
- Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: they believed that being ethical meant doing that
which had good outcomes for all people. Mill proposed the following distinctions in
utilitarianism:
Act utilitarianism: whether a single act is right or wrong depends on the amount of common
good it produces.
Rule utilitarianism: focuses on creating rules that produce the most common good.
So, this theory is pretty powerful, since utility is measurable and already commonly used in
economics in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. The approach is useful in case of social and
environmental impact assessments. It’s really just listing the pro’s and con’s for all parties
and choose the action with the pro’s for the most amount of people.
The underlying concept is the notion of utility. Hedonist view is where utility is measured in
terms of pleasure and pain. Eudemonistic view is where utility is measured in terms of
happiness and unhappiness. Ideal view is where utility is measured in terms of pleasure or
happiness + all intrinsically human goods like friendship, love, trust etc. Some key
characteristics of utilitarianism are consequentialism, hedonism, maximalism, universalism.
Ofc there are also some problems with utilitarianism:
- Subjectivity: assessing the pleasure and pain of something depends on the perspective of
the person. It is thus context-dependent and difficult to compare between people.
- Equal weighing: due to universalism, all must be included, and equal weight needs to be
given to all concerned. You can imagine that this runs into problems relating questions to the
just distribution of wealth.
- Quantification: some pleasures and pains are not quantifiable. Is losing a good contract
really comparable to forcing children into labor? It can thus be contradictory to basic human
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