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Business Ethics as a Postmodern Phenomenon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Ronald M. Green
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Abstract

This paper contends that work in business ethics participates in two key aspects of the broad philosophical and aesthetic movement known as postmodernism. First, like postmodernists generally, business ethicists reject the “grand narratives” of historical and conceptual justification, especially the narratives embodied in Marxism and Milton Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism. Second, both in the methods and content of their work, business ethicists share postmodernism’s “de-centering” of perspective and discovery of “otherness,” “difference” and marginality as valid modes of approach to experience and moral decision.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 219 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1993

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References

Notes

1 Quoted in Linda, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 42Google Scholar.

2 Albrecht, Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David, Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 38Google Scholar.

3 “Foreword,” to Jean-François, Lyotard’s, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

4 Tom, Kitwood, “Psychotherapy, Postmodernism and Morality,” Journal of Moral Education 19:1 (January 1990), 4Google Scholar.

5 Jim, Cheney, “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative,” Environmental Ethics 11:2 (Summer 1989), 134Google Scholar.

6 Conversation between Lyotard, J. F. and Dubost, J. P. in Jean-François, Lyotard, Das postmoderne Wissen, Bremen, , 1982, p. 131Google Scholar. Quoted in Wellmer, p. 42. For a similar perspective, see John, D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 259Google Scholar.

7 Hutcheon, p. 12.

8 Ibid., p. 58.

9 Ibid., p. 213.

10 Ibid., p. 85.

11 Caputo, p. 261.

12 Seyla, Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 16Google Scholar.