APPLYING CARE ETHICS to BUSINESS Issues in Business Ethics
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APPLYING CARE ETHICS TO BUSINESS Issues in Business Ethics VOLUME 34 Series Editors: Wim Dubbink, CMO, Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Mollie Painter-Morland, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, USA Consulting Editor: Pat Werhane, Director, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University, USA Former Series Editors: Brian Harvey, Henk van Luijk†, Pat Werhane Editorial Board: Georges Enderle, University of Notre Dame, USA William C. Frederick, University of Pittsburg, USA Campbell Jones, University of Leicester, United Kingdom Daryl Koehn, University of St. Thomas, USA Andreas Scherer, University of Zurich, Switzerland Horst Steinmann, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Hiro Umezu, Keio University, Japan Lu Xiaohe, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, P.R. China For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6077 Applying Care Ethics to Business Edited by MAURICE HAMINGTON Metropolitan State College of Denver, Denver, CO, USA MAUREEN SANDER-STAUDT Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA 123 Editors Maurice Hamington Maureen Sander-Staudt Adobe Place 1645 W. Columbine Dr. 12502 Highlands Ranch El Mirage Colorado 80126 Arizona 85335 USA USA [email protected] [email protected] ISSN 0925-6733 ISBN 978-90-481-9306-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9307-3 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9307-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932918 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Acknowledgements My thanks go foremost to my family, friends, and colleagues, who put the “care” in my “care ethics”, especially my partner, David. This volume grew from many revisions of an original paper, which, as a manuscript, received patient and thought- ful commentary from my colleagues at Arizona State University, Dr. Jackie Gately, Dr. Bertha Manninen, and Dr. Shari Collins-Chobanian. I am also tremendously grateful to my co-editor, Dr. Maurice Hamington, for his mentorship and buoyant cultivation of this project, as well as for the thoughtful commentary from the staff and reviewers at Springer. Thank you to my research assistants, David Delgadillo and Tanya Moushi, who lent their computer and organizational skills. Finally, this work was informed by many business experiences and relations, so thanks also to those countless individuals and institutions who influenced my thinking on the application of care ethics to business. Maureen Sander-Staudt A scholarly volume of original chapters involves the good will and hard work of many people. Most of all, thanks go to the participating authors who take a leap of faith to join a project like this—at first without a certain publishing contract, and ultimately with no remuneration. For Applying Care Ethics to Business, the contrib- utors represent an array of accomplished scholars who have many demands on their time but they thought that the further development and application of care ethics was a significant enough endeavor to add to their research agenda. In addition to the contributors, there are so many individuals who are involved in the shaping, edit- ing, and production of a book such as this. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the book as well as Springer commentators, Dr. Wim Dubbink and Dr. Mollie Painter-Morland, for their feedback on the manuscript. Much appreciation also goes to Philosophy of Law and Ethics Editor, Neil Olivier, and his assistant, Diana Nijenhuijzen, for shepherding this project through revision and production. Finally, I would like to thank my co-editor, Maureen Sander-Staudt who is a delight to work with and who brought so much insight and character to this book. As always, I appreciate the love and support of my partner, Stephanie, which makes my scholarly pursuits possible. Maurice Hamington v Introduction: Care Ethics and Business Ethics Maureen Sander-Staudt and Maurice Hamington Corporations are places in which both individual human beings and human communities engage in caring activities that are aimed at mutual support and unparalleled human achievement. —R. Edward Freeman and Jeanne Liedtke (1991) Background The end of the second millennium saw a number of changes in the realm of business, among them, acknowledged economic triumph of Capitalism over Communism, a proliferation of unregulated global market ventures, the failing of several world banks, and profound decreases of confidence and stability in global financial sys- tems. As markets struggle for recovery, business ethicists seek to illuminate how values can be conceptualized and operative in business for greater human flourish- ing in the upcoming years, with care ethicists specifically calling for a more central reformative and informative place to be made for the value of care. Virginia Held, for example, uses a care perspective to call for limits on markets, and surmises that: “If we see care as an important value and framework of interpretation for govern- ment and civil society, as well as for the sphere of the personal, we will approach many of the issues involved in the expansion of the market differently from those for whom the protection of rights or the maximization of preference satisfaction are the only public concerns” (Held 2006). The emergence of care ethics as a distinct moral theory is attributable to the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan and philosopher Nel Noddings in the mid-1980s. Both charged traditional moral frameworks with male bias and declared a “care per- spective” to be a legitimate if not superior alternative to the “justice perspectives” offered by Utilitarianism and Kantianism. Often understood as a species of femi- nist ethics, but also pursued in more gender-neutral contexts, care ethics has been applied fruitfully to a variety of disciplines, including business studies. Although there have been significant in-roads made toward applying care ethics to business by authors such as R. Edward Freeman, Warren French, Daryl Koehn, Jeanne Lietdka, Alexander Weiss, and others, this volume marks one of the first attempts to make this collaboration more explicit and detailed. vii viii Introduction: Care Ethics and Business Ethics Care ethics is a comparatively young moral framework with many components yet to be worked out, but the authors included in this volume agree that a morality rooted in care fruitfully departs from traditional justice approaches to business, and yields new insights into ethical business conduct that can improve markets for the better. In this they confer with Mona Harrington, who argues that we ought to “add care to the pantheon of national social values,” and that a most important key to changing a country’s care system is the workplace (Harrington 2000). Although many essays in this volume are critical of “business as usual,” the purpose of this collection is not to pursue the more radical, but possibly legitimate reasons given by some care ethicists to reject Capitalism wholesale (Tronto 1994; Sevenhuijsen 1998). Rather, it opens the possibilities for various economic systems to be rendered more compatible with the goals of care without slipping into naivety or utopian pursuits. Certainly, care ethics recommends different approaches to business, posit- ing corporate responsibilities that seem enlarged by traditional standards, but most authors agree that care it is not entirely incompatible with the goal of profit, and that no one, including a business person, is required to feel or express care for everyone and everything, or in a way that causes severe self-deprivation. Defining and Delineating Care As evident by the diverse utilizations of the concept of care in this volume, “care” is difficult to define because of its vast connotations. Care ethicists define care var- iously as a set of dispositional attitudes (Noddings 1984), a practice (Tronto 1994), a labor that is inherently relational (Ruddick 1989), and a motivational virtue (Slote 2001). Many care ethicists define care most fundamentally as a face-to-face prac- tice to underscore that care is work that must be done on a direct level, and that involves energy expenditure and personal investment on the part of its practitioners. In order to narrow the scope of care and highlight its dimensions of social power, Diemut Bubeck further distinguishes “care” from “personal service,” the former which involves meeting the needs of those who are unable to meet such needs them- selves, the latter which involves meeting needs for others who could meet such needs themselves (Bubeck 1995). For similar reasons, Held inclines toward defining care as a practice, but broadly, so as to avoid the presumption that care is paradigmatic only of mothering, or of car- ing for children, the sick, or elderly (Held 2006, 31). She notes that care refers also to the work of extended families, hospital and domestic workers, teachers, and many others. Building on the distinction between the feeling of “caring about” some- thing, and the activity of taking care of, or “caring for” someone, Held observes that “caring for” someone is distinct from “caring for” a certain kind of music. Although doubtful that warm feelings must always accompany the labor of care, she speculates that humans tend to care for others best when both senses of “caring for” are operative. Held concludes that care must be able to refer concurrently to work, motive, value, and more. The ambiguity in care ethics thus resists a precise Introduction: Care Ethics and Business Ethics ix or fixed central meaning of “care,” but provides care ethics with the advantage of flexible adaptability.