Goals of this chapter

After studying this chapter you will be able to:

• understand the most prominent rationalist approaches to moral reasoning typically employed in business ethics;

• understand the theories of moral development and its limitations;

• develop insight into rational choice theory and its limitations;

• understand the criticisms of and alternatives to rationalist approaches to decision-making;

• understand Derrida's notion of undecidability;

• identify some aporias in everyday business life.

Introduction

Those in business have many reasons to be concerned about the way moral decisions are made. The success of business organizations depends on their ability to generate fair profit from their goods or services. For this to happen, employees must show up for work and labour diligently in the firm's interest, suppliers must keep contracts, customers must continue to believe in the value of the goods or services they receive from the corporation and pay for them on time, and shareholders must continue to trust in the corporation to invest their money in its pursuits. If in any one of these respects individuals or groups stop making decisions that are fair, honest, and trustworthy, the whole enterprise will fail. In what we have argued thus far, we have employed a form of reasoning that is probably the most influential in business ethics, namely consequentialist reasoning. Consequentialists argue that it makes sense to do the right thing because good consequences result from such decisions and behaviours. A very important presupposition that underpins consequentialist thinking is that people will always choose those decisions and actions that will best serve their interests. This way of thinking about human beings is called ‘rational choice theory’, and is used by practitioners in economics, management, philosophy, and psychology. Rational choice theory argues that given a choice, decision-makers will select optimal options in the pursuit of happiness, i.e. decisions are made based on utility.