The impossibility of corporate ethics: for a Levinasian approach to managerial ethics

Abstract

The moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas offers a prospectus of stark impossibility for any programme of business or corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that for Levinas the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasises an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the radical otherness of the Other. It stresses the imperious demand we experience in our humanity to be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognise, about ourselves or about the other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential, involving us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. Consequently, it is questionable whether corporations can even be moral subjects in a Levinasian sense. We assert not only that corporations cannot deal with such a demand, but further that this helps to understand the failure of the business ethics project to date. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in any organisational setting, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined and, as a contribution, we propose here a series of questions and injunctions. These questions and injunctions will explicate for individual managers some key terms of a Levinasian practice for which we will propose a vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. This vocabulary will provide managers with insights to an experience of alterity and may encourage them to experience the challenge of radical otherness and the irresistible call to a pre-ontological, timeless and infinite individual ethic.

The role of moral disengagement in supply chain management research

“…Several authors have argued that morality only can be attributed to human beings (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007;McMahon, 2008;Jensen, 2010). For authors in related fields this is not an issue, but if we only turn to Bandura to see how the theory is used, we might be misguided, as he himself applies it to both individuals, and non-individuals (e.g., organizations).…”

What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

“…This has inspired attempts in organization studies to modify the Levinasian project: rejecting the primordiality of ethics (Hancock, 2008), admitting that ethics can only be realized with politics (McMurray et al, 2011;Rhodes, 2012), hinting at the affective dimension of ethics (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007;Rhodes, 2012), and sketching out ethical organizational guidelines from Levinasian principles (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007;Wray--Bliss, 2013). Nonetheless, as the ethics of recognition remains central if not perfectly intact in these contributions, we find it more fruitful to make a new start, to develop an affectively embodied ethics of organizations by utilizing ideas that long precede Levinas.…”

The moral responsibility of project selectors

“…To be responsible is to be ready to see one's actions assessed in terms of a causal attribution of blame or praise. However, and although legal and therefore economic responsibility often stays at attributability, to be responsible also involves being ready to face the other and answer to the demands that emerge from such an encounter [29]. Responsibility involves preparing oneself both to be responsible for, or attributability, and responsible toward, or accountability.…”

“…The accountability view of responsibility consists in being ready to actually meet those who for some reason to think that they have a say in the project. The term "actually" is pivotal in that it excludes ritualistic or purely formal answers; so is the term "meet" that refers to the personal involvement that emerges from face-to-face situations, where face-to-face is to be understood not only in a literal but also in a metaphorical sense; and so is the term "say" that indicates that one has to do with the live dynamic of the saying rather than the insensitive logic of the said [29]. Practically, accountability refers to a practice of answerability, for example through an enactment of corporate social responsibility that is anchored in a genuine sensibility to the concerns of those most vulnerable to the effects of corporate conduct [31].…”