The Promise of Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and Business Ethics

Abstract

Pragmatists believe that philosophical inquiry must engage closely with practice to be useful and that practice serves as a source of social norms. As a growing alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions, pragmatism is well suited for research in business ethics, but its role remains underappreciated. This article focuses on Richard Rorty, a key figure in the pragmatist tradition. We read Rorty as a source of insight about the ethical and political nature of business practice in contemporary global markets, focusing specifically on his views about moral sentiments, agency, and democratic deliberation. Importantly for business ethicists, Rorty’s approach sets in stark relief our moral responsibility as useful, practical thinkers in addressing the societal challenges of our time. We use “modern slavery” as an empirical context to highlight the relevance of Rorty’s approach to business ethics.

Toward Humanistic Business Ethics

“…By leveraging collaboration across the domains of research of ethics, economics, psychology, and entrepreneurship, the HBE model can help us to undertake fruitful inquiries into the way business works (and should work) at its best. Incorporating insights from the Normative and Behavioral research models, HBE is a useful approach to frame difficult problems of modern business in a different way—see, for example the discussions around “modern slavery” (Pouryousefi & Freeman, 2021), “employee well-being” (Parmar et al, 2019), “neurotic management” (de Colle & Freeman, 2020), and “entrepreneurial opportunities” (Harmeling et al, 2009). In doing so, HBE helps scholars to address problems that the other research models of business ethics are unable to fully answer, opening up new avenues for future research and a more fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars interested in both business and ethics.…”

“…We argue that the current evolution of business ethics is on a healthy and prosperous path, with the emergence of an approach that we call Humanistic Business Ethics (HBE). However, this argument requires that we take a broad view as the HBE approach incorporates some key ideas of what has come to be called stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984; Freeman et al, 2010) into business ethics research alongside a pragmatist philosophical approach (Freeman et al, 2010, 2020; Parmar, Phillips, & Freeman, 2017; Pouryousefi & Freeman, 2021; Wicks & Freeman, 1998). Our argument is not an entirely new idea.…”

Harm Reduction, Solidarity, and Social Mobility as Target Functions: A Rortian Approach to Stakeholder Theory

“…Recently, Godfrey and Lewis ( 2019 ) have picked up on this call to use pragmatism as a moral foundation for contemporary stakeholder theory. And Pouryousefi and Freeman ( 2021 ) have brought a renewed focus on the pragmatism of Rorty, reading him as a source of insight into the ethical nature of business practice in contemporary global markets.…”

“…And so, we offer a Rortian approach to stakeholder theory. In so doing, we answer the long (Wicks & Freeman, 1998 ) and renewed (Godfrey & Lewis, 2019 ; Freeman et al, 2020 ; Pouryousefi & Freeman, 2021 ) calls for pragmatism in stakeholder theory, unearthing the possibility of harm reduction, solidarity, and social mobility, the foundational building blocks of an ironist ethical perspective, replacing efficiency in the mainstream vocabulary of stakeholder thinking.…”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Stakeholders

“…A growing body of work invokes pragmatism in connection to stakeholder theory (Godfrey & Lewis, 2019;Parmar et al, 2015;Wicks & Freeman, 1998). The upshot, captured best by Pouryousefi and Freeman (2021), is that a pragmatist turn in stakeholder theorizing might, following Rorty (1998Rorty ( , 1999, consist of conversations intended to try normative claims about firm-stakeholder interactions, weigh the relative usefulness of holding to such claims, and frame this enterprise in service to values. Viewed as the basis for future research, stakeholder pragmatism (or pragmatic stakeholderism) moves closer to the experimentalism of practice and interrogates potential future systems for human enterprise: How might we bring managers' individual moral practice more nearly into line with humanistic and democratic values such that daily practice and momentous decisions might both incline toward their advancement (Dmitrieva et al, 2020)?…”