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13 - After Virtue, Managers and Business Ethics
- from Part IV - After Virtue beyond Philosophy
- Edited by Tom Angier, University of Cape Town
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- Book:
- MacIntyre's <i>After Virtue</i> at 40
- Published online:
- 12 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 26 October 2023, pp 239-257
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- Chapter
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Summary
Over the last four decades, Alasdair MacIntyre’s influence on the field of business ethics has grown significantly as an important minority of his interlocutors, including prominently Beabout and Moore, have argued that good management can be understood as an institutionally reproduced MacIntyrean practice. Conversely, MacIntyre’s relevance to this discipline has been vigorously contested by a second group of scholars led by Knight, who emphasise After Virtue’s critical discussion of the modern manager as one of the contemporary ‘social characters’ whose existence reflects the emotivist parameters of modernity. MacIntyre follows Weber in viewing management as a group whose role it is to seek efficient and effective means to pre-given ends. Understood thus, management is anathema to the reproduction of the virtues, because it obliterates the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Developing this aspect of his thought, Knight has interpreted MacIntyre as being entirely critical of the pretentions of business ethics. While writers such as Beabout and Moore do not deny the power of this critique of management, they counter that not all managers act in this (historically limited) Weberian manner. Rather than join sides in this debate, I argue that its two poles are best understood as two sides of a lacuna at the heart of MacIntyre’s sociology. I suggest that this gap in MacIntyre’s thought manifests itself most clearly in a breach between his broader theoretical pronouncements on management and his more concrete commentaries on specific business issues, and that this breach is evidence that the concept of character is, like Weber’s ideal type, a utopia that is at once too abstractly static and too descriptive to do the work asked of it. To overcome this gap in his account of our modern emotivist culture, I suggest a more dialectical and dynamic/historical conception of social character, understood in terms of Marx’s concept of determinate abstraction.
A Marxist perspective
- Edited by Iain Ferguson, University of New South Wales, Michael Lavalette
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- Book:
- Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 March 2014, pp 416-420
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Summary
Sarah Banks’ opening contribution to this collection is appealing in part because of her expansive category of ethics. Indeed, by contrast with the dominant tendency within academia she even acknowledges that Marx's views on the subject deserve a hearing. If there is a weakness with her article it is perhaps that she doesn't develop this insight far enough. In particular I think that had she thought more about Marx's concept of alienation she might be more critical of the idea that resistance to austerity can be based upon the core values of social work. As we shall see, it is not that this idea is without legs; it is rather that it needs to be handled carefully.
Marx's ethics is often misconstrued because it involves a profound challenge to the clear delineation between science and ethics that is taken as axiomatic within post-Kantian moral theory. Capital (Marx, 1975) is simultaneously scientific, ethical and political in scope, and this reflects Marx's view that because we interpret the world from concrete, socially determined standpoints it is impossible to unpick what we know of it from our ethically saturated forms of practice within it. From this perspective, modern moral theory's attempt to separate factual and value statements is not simply wrong, more profoundly it represents a naturalisation of the socially determined standpoint of the individual within civil society. The power of the nihilist critique of morality stems from Nietzsche's recognition that we do interpret the world from particular perspectives, but because he too naturalises the standpoint of egoistic individualism his critique of morality is best understood less as a radical alternative to the moral standpoint than as the flipside of the same error: by naturalising egoistic individualism neither approach is able to see beyond an emotivist context within which morality has been reduced to individual opinion. This is why Alasdair MacIntyre bemoans the modern moral condition as a simulacrum of classical ethics.
MacIntyre's alternative practice-based ethics shares some similarities with Banks’ comments on the ethics of social work. According to MacIntyre, a practice is any complex form of human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realised as practitioners strive to excel at it.