A Genealogy of Business Ethics: A Nietzschean Perspective

Abstract

Christianity, egoism, equality, justice, morality, Nietzsche, religion, science, stakeholder,

Strengthening “Giving Voice to Values” in Business Schools by Reconsidering the “Invisible Hand” Metaphor

“…We believe students have been influenced by misinterpretations of Smith's metaphor to use it as a moral prescript, rather than as an instrument to use in their own valuation processes. Our analysis takes up Worden's (2009) challenge to rethink the role of philosophy in business ethics education, replacing moralism with a more genealogical approach to understand our students and ourselves as teachers. Commentators on Smith have argued that Smith's use of the ''invisible hand'' was his way to pragmatically make sense of how selfish individuals take care of others because it is in their own interest to do so.…”

New Directions in Legal Scholarship: Implications for Business Ethics Research, Theory, and Practice

“…however, one must be aware that situational factors will often overwhelm even the most virtuous disposition unless one is particularly vigilant (hanson & yosifon, 2003). one may take a Nietzschean approach in criticizing business ethicists who have embraced the relevance of sci-entific literature to the field at the expense of traditional philosophical approaches (Worden, 2009), but one should not seriously reconsider the genealogy of morals through Nietzsche's or anyone else's eyes without taking into account the abundant, if controversial, scientific evidence that many of man's moral judgments result from a universal moral grammar that may well be the product of evolutionary forces (Mikhail, 2007).…”

“…Although some celebrate the fact that legal scholarship is "a broad church that welcomes all who choose to identify with it" (Arthurs, 2002), others have despaired that with the importation of significant amounts of interdisciplinary and empirical research there remains no uniquely legal empirical methodology (hall & Wright, 2008). As increasingly sophisticated business ethics research becomes less accessible to teachers and practitioners, and at a time when many philosophers are deeply hostile to much interdisciplinary research (held, 1996;Patten, 1977) and empirical methodology (Shea, 2009;Worden, 2009), it is certainly possible that business ethics scholars will soon be asking themselves similar questions.…”

A Nietzschean re‐evaluation of values as a way of re‐imagining business ethics

“…Nietzsche performs what he calls a re‐evaluation of values in order to deconstruct the meaning of the phenomenon of values as a basis upon which to give new meaning to the language of values. While we will argue that Nietzsche does not succeed in the practice of re‐evaluating values, he astutely identifies the problem with the field of business ethics (Knights & O’Leary, , p. 132, Worden, , p. 427) allowing us to highlight the need to re‐evaluate all values. The importance of this is that instead of assuming that we know what ethics means and that all we need to do is to discover our own particular ethics, Nietzsche reveals that to address the crisis of ethics, the challenge is one of understanding what we mean by ethics in the first place.…”