Practices, Governance, and Politics: Applying MacIntyre’s Ethics to Business

Abstract

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre's positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre's concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore's attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore's attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre's account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre's advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre's own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre's work is often taken to imply.

Corporate Philanthropy as a Context for Moral Agency, a MacIntyrean Enquiry

“…These features cohere with those who argue that employee involvement may enable moral agency within large-scale commercial organisations (e.g. Bernacchio and Couch 2015;Sinnicks 2014;Moore 2017;Vriens et al 2018). Our evidence provides support for their arguments as to the positive relationship between moral agency and employee involvement.…”

“…The literature on 'virtuous structures' presupposes a series of agreements as to the importance of organisational context for the development of employees' moral agency (Vriens et al 2018;Sinnicks 2014). In virtue-based accounts, habituation and repetition are critical to the development of the virtues and this includes agents' own conceptualisation of the moral dimensions of action.…”

“…Bernacchio and Couch (2015, p. 140) argue that employee involvement in governance may provide "experiences that call for the exercise of virtue" even when work routines are Taylorised. Sinnicks (2014Sinnicks ( , 2016 and Moore (2017) argue for governance and leadership processes that fall short of workers' control. Bernacchio (2018) argues that virtuous action in organisations is more likely in the context of naturally occurring networks of giving and receiving that develop through organisational processes.…”

Measuring Individuals’ Virtues in Business

“…In response, proponents of virtue in the context of business have argued that MacIntyre promotes a view that fails to recognise the potential for management to support practices and their associated internal goods through governance (Moore, 2012b) or regulation (Sinnicks, 2014). They also argue that MacIntyre fails to recognise potential for business to support the virtues (Maitland, 1997) and focus on community (Dawson and Bartholomew, 2003) especially where for many small and medium sized businesses profit is not the dominant driver for their owners.…”

Moral Education at Work: On the Scope of MacIntyre’s Concept of a Practice

“…Again, we can admit an asymmetry between predominantly productive and non-productive practices while retaining the view that this asymmetry does not imperil the category of productive practice. However, there are greater challenges in the case of productive practices, which will sometimes be best approached as though they are sites of the practice of politics, as Sinnicks (2014) has suggested, a topic we will return to below.…”