Ethics for People Who Decide
What does it mean to decide well, not only effectively but rightly, when your choices affect people who have no say in them?
Most business decisions are judged on whether they work. This path is about the other question: whether they are right, and how people who make consequential decisions can notice when they are not.
It begins with three traditions that still structure moral argument: Aristotle’s ethics of character and practical wisdom, Kant’s ethics of principle and Mill’s ethics of consequences. Rawls then offers a test for fairness, and MacIntyre and Murdoch turn attention to practices and to the quality of moral perception. The last two books are about how ordinary people in organisations come to do wrong, and how to see it coming.
The ideas of practical wisdom, moral luck and tragic choice are companions to this path.
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Aristotle’s ethics of character and practical wisdom remains the most useful account of what it means to judge well in particular situations, where rules run out.
- Read it for
- Virtue as a mean, practical wisdom and the role of habit in forming character.
- Carry forward
- What habits is our organisation forming in the people who work here?
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Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Kant’s short, demanding book argues that the rightness of an act depends on the principle behind it, and that people must never be treated merely as means.
- Read it for
- The categorical imperative in its formulations, especially the formula of humanity.
- Carry forward
- Would we be comfortable if the principle behind this decision became the rule for everyone?
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Mill’s case for judging actions by their consequences for everyone’s happiness is the philosophy that most business reasoning assumes without naming.
- Read it for
- The greatest happiness principle, higher and lower pleasures, and the chapter on justice.
- Carry forward
- Whose costs are missing from our calculation of benefits?
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Rawls asked what principles people would choose if they did not know their place in society, an exercise that tests any policy, pricing or platform rule.
- Read it for
- The original position, the veil of ignorance and the difference principle.
- Carry forward
- Would we design this rule the same way if we did not know which side of it we would be on?
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MacIntyre argues that modern moral language has lost its foundations, and recovers the idea of practices with their own internal goods, which illuminates professional ethics.
- Read it for
- The account of practices and institutions, and the critique of the manager as a moral character.
- Carry forward
- What is the internal good of our craft that money alone cannot buy?
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Murdoch argues that moral life consists mostly in attention, in how we see situations and people, long before any moment of choice.
- Read it for
- The idea of attention and the difficulty of seeing others justly.
- Carry forward
- Whom do we routinely fail to see when we make decisions?
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Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial introduced the banality of evil: great wrongs can be carried out by ordinary functionaries who do not think about what they are doing.
- Read it for
- The account of thoughtlessness and the epilogue on judgement and responsibility.
- Carry forward
- Which routine part of our work would look different if we stopped to think about it?
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Ends with practice. Bazerman shows how leaders miss critical information through bounded awareness, and how to train the habit of noticing what others overlook.
- Read it for
- The cases of failures to notice, and the practical steps to become a first-class noticer.
- Carry forward
- What would we see if we looked at this decision through the eyes of someone it harms?
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