The possibility of business ethics: Characterizing the corporate decisionmaker as portrayed by management academics

Business ethics is currently split into two fields---philosophy and management. It has been observed that there is a disconnect between the way philosophers and business academics work on business ethics. My project aims to bring together the two disciplines. My thesis is that philosophers working on business ethics have made themselves inconsequential and irrelevant to management academics because they fail to acknowledge that the two disciplines employ different models of the corporate decision maker. If I am right, then it makes sense that management academics ignore the work of philosophers, which means that we are well positioned and motivated to set new objectives for philosophers working on business ethics in order to reverse this effect. I will outline a new agenda for philosophers working on business ethics in which theoretical work on individual agency is utilized in order to explicitly characterize models of the corporate decision maker implicit in the work of management academics. The objective is to motivate critical assessment of these characterizations (by myself and others) and then to motivate the construction of alternative and contrasting interpretations, whether to elicit or evade criticisms, of the interpreted models of the corporate decision maker. Management academics will then be alerted to the characteristics they assume of the corporate decision maker and they will be pressured and compelled to contend with normative judgements regarding those characterizations. As a result, the work of philosophers will be validated as consequential and indispensable components of academic business ethics.