Rorty - Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics

PHILOSOPHY'S ROLE VIS-A-VIS BUSINESS ETHICS

Note from the Editor. Richard Rorty's invited address to the 2005 annualmeeting of the Society for Business Ethics prompted extensive com-ments from and discussion by those attending the meeting. In lightof this, Professor Rorty's address is reprinted here, and is followed byinvited responses from three past presidents of the Society for BusinessEthics, and a brief concluding comment from Richard Rorty.

IS PHILOSOPHY RELEVANT TO APPLIED ETHICS?Invited Address to the Society of Business Ethics Annual Meeting,

August 2005

Richard Rorty

Abstract: If, like Hegel and Dewey, one takes a historicist, anti-Platonistview of moral progress, one will be dubious about the idea that moraltheory can be more than the systematization of the widely-shared moralintuitions of a certain time and place. One will follow Shelley, Dewey,and Patricia Werhane in emphasizing the role of the imagination inmaking moral progress possible. Taking this stance will lead one toconclude that although philosophy is indeed relevant to applied ethics,it is not more relevant than many other fields of study (such as history,law, political science, anthropology, literature, and theology).

Philosophy has a glorious past and an uncertain future. That is why, when think-ing about our role in intellectual life, we philosophy professors prefer to look

backward. Doing so lets us see ourselves as the successors of Plato, St. Augustine,Spinoza, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche. Those men imagined new shapes that the livesof individuals and communities might assume. Thinking of ourselves as their heirshelps us imagine that we might shape the human future.

When we turn from the past to the present, however, we remember that we arenot being paid to foment intellectual or social revolutions. We have been hired bycolleges and universities to be responsible professionals, content to work within awell-defined area of expertise. As philosophy became one more academic discipline,it became harder for philosophers to do something bold and original. For the more

© 2006. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 369-380

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original and imaginative a philosopher is, the less she looks like a skilled, well-trained, disciplined professional. You cannot professionalize imaginativeness.

The professionalization of philosophy began about two hundred years ago, ina period when the modem research university was beginning to take shape. Thatperiod, the time of Hegel and Humboldt, was also philosophy's acme. Since then,philosophy has gradually lost prestige. It has become invisible to the general public,and has drifted off the radar screens of most intellectuals.

The principal reason for this marginalization is that the so-called "warfare be-tween science and theology" has tapered off. By and large, science has triumphed.Despite occasional flare-ups, such as the current assault on evolutionary biology,most Westerners who read books are content to let their view of the universe beshaped by the natural sciences. Religious faith has been revised, by most educatedbelievers, so as not to conflict with the stories scientists tell.

As long as the warfare between science and theology lasted, there was an im-portant role for philosophical theories to play. For thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza,Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and Marx all confronted an urgent question: how can themoral idealism common to Platonism, Judaism, and Chistianity survive affer we haveaccepted a materialist account of the way the universe works? What is the place ofmoral ideals in a clockwork universe? As long as those questions dominated intel-lectual life, philosophical theories about the nature of reality and about the scopeof the limits of human knowledge were still relevant to felt needs. The question ofwhether human beings were more than just clever animals remained urgent.

In recent times, however, the question "what is it to be a human being?"—"whatmakes human beings special?"—has lost its urgency. That question has been re-placed by two others. The first is political: "How can we create a better world forour descendants to inhabit?" The second is existential: "What sort of person shall Itry to become?" This change resulted from an increased awareness of the possibihtyof radical historical change, and from an increased tolerance for human diversity.

In the course of the past two centuries, historians, novelists, and anthropologistshave helped us reahze that the human future need not resemble the human past.The philosophers ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shared with Plato andEpicurus the assumption that the human situation was essentially the same at alltimes and places. But we modems have come to think that there is no single GoodLife for Man. We no longer take for granted that all the members of our speciesshare an unchanging essence, and that knowledge of this essence can help us decidewhat to do with ourselves.

Plato invented philosophy by postulating the existence of unchanging essences.So the changes in the intellectual life of the West have, in the course of the last twocenturies, produced a spate of radically anti-Platonic philosophies. The historicismthat Marx took over from Hegel was the first radical break with Platonic essential-ism. Marx's thesis that philosophers should stop trying to understand the world andstart trying to change it epitomized the intellectuals' new-found willingness to tumaway from metaphysics in favor of politics.

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Nietzsche's existentiaHsm was the counterpart of Marxism at the level of the privateindividual. "If you have a virtue," Nietzsche said, "let it be your virtue." His point wasthat virtue not should be thought of as a matter of conforming to antecedent normsbut rather of being faithful to one's own project of self-creation. In the hundred-oddyears since Nietzsche wrote, anti-Platonist movements with names like "pragmatism,""existentialism," and "postmodernism" have prohferated. The burden of all of themwas pretty much the same: there are no unchanging essences to be grasped, only newways of describing both ourselves and the universe to be invented.

Anti-Platonists are often accused of relativism. Doubting the existence of some-thing transcultural and ahistorical that can provide guidance for moral choice, theseaccusers say, amounts to denying the existence of absolute values. But we know thatslavery and torture are absolutely, objectively, wrong. So, they argue, there mustbe something that makes them so—if not the Will of God, than the Moral Law, orReason, or some other secular surrogate for the divine.

Anti-Platonists like myself, the people sometimes described as "post-modemrelativists," do not accept the correspondence theory of truth. So we have no use forthe notion of a belief being made true by the world. We think that adding "absolute"to "wrong" or "objective" to "truth" is an empty rhetorical gesture. It is just a wayof pounding on the podium. Saying that torture is absolutely wrong does nothing tostill doubts about whether to save the city by torturing the terrorist. Everybody agreesthat it is absolutely wrong to refuse sick children medical help, but nobody agrees onhow the doctor's bill is to be paid. When decisions get tough, invoking notions like"absoluteness" and "objectivity" does nothing to make them easier. Philosophers'claims to have Truth and Reason on their side resemble theologians' claims to knowthe will of God. Such claims are advertising slogans rather than arguments.

God has provided no algorithms for resolving tough moral dilemmas, and neitherhave the great secular philosophers. Urging that there is something that makes ac-tions wrong or moral behefs true is an empty gesture. For we have no way of gettingin touch with this purported truth-maker save to seek coherence among our ownmoral intuitions. Though truth and wrongness are not relative notions, justificationis. For what counts as justification, either of actions or of beliefs, is always relativeto the antecedent behefs of those whom one is seeking to convince. Anti-slaveryarguments that we find completely persuasive would probably not have convincedJefferson or Aristotle. Our best arguments against torture would probably not havebudged the devout and learned prelates who ran the Holy Inquisition. That is whywe are somedmes tempted to say, misleadingly, that a certain practice is right inone culture and wrong in another, or that a certain astrophysical theory was truefor Aristotle but false for Newton.

The reason this turn of phrase is misleading is that all we really mean is that,given his other behefs, Aristotle was perfectly justified in accepting a false theory.Analogously, the Mongol horde was perfectly justified in gang-raping the womenof Baghdad, given their other behefs. Their behavior was, to be sure, wrong. Ifthere were such a thing as absolute justification, we could say that it was absolutely

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unjustified. But there is no such thing. Justification is a relation between beliefs andother beliefs. What can be justified to one audience cannot be justified to others. Weare no closer to absolute justification for our moral beliefs than was Genghis Khan.We justify our actions and beliefs to each other by appealing to our own lights—tothe intuitions fostered at our own time and place. The Mongols did the same.

Philosophy, however, got its start when Plato insisted that there was such a thingas absolute justification—that "the light of reason" was equally accessible to allreflective human beings. Whereas empirical inquiry into how things work dependson contingent availability of relevant evidence, Plato thought that we akeady hadwithin us all the data needed for moral deliberation. The Platonic idea that we canlearn how to be morally infallible by seeking coherence among our beliefs survivesin the Kantian idea that a Nazi or a mafioso could, if he reflected long enough, breakout of the culture in which he had been raised by detecting his own irrationality. Asimilar view is presupposed by philosophers who claim that training in philosophypermits you to become clearer about your moral concepts. Eor these philosophers,as for Plato and Kant, you can escape from the limitations of your background byexercising your innate rational powers.

One great divide in contemporary philosophy is between people who still be-lieve something like this, and those who, like me, believe nothing of the sort. Forus, there is no particular connection between right action and clear thinking. Therewere clear-thinking Nazis and muddled saints. There is no connection between skillat justifying one's beliefs—rhetorical effectiveness—and having the right beliefs.Being able to have the right beliefs and to do the right thing is largely a matter ofluck—of being bom in a certain place and a certain time. For purposes of havingtrue beliefs about the movements of heavenly bodies, Aristotle was bom at a badtime and place and Newton at a better one. Eor purposes of knowing whether eithertorture or sodomy is a moral abomination, all of us were bom into a better culturethan were those who worked for the Inquisition.

For those of us who hold this view, the obvious problem is how to think of moralprogress. If there is nothing of the sort that Plato postulated—an underlying senseof right and wrong that is common to all human beings at all times and places—canwe still say that we have made moral progress since the days of the Inquisition? Ifwe do not have a faculty called "reason" that can be relied upon to help us make theright moral decisions, how can we make sense of the claim to make better decisionsnow than when we were callow adolescents?

The best answer to these questions, I think, is that individuals become awareof more altematives, and therefore wiser, as they grow older. The human race asa whole has become wiser as history has moved along. The source of these newaltematives is the human imagination. It is the ability to come up with new ideas,rather than the ability to get in touch with unchanging essences, that is the engineof moral progress. John Dewey quoted with approval Shelley's dictum that moralityonly "arranges the elements that poetry has created."'

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Moral progress is not, on this pragmatist view, a matter of getting clearer aboutsometbing that was there all the time. Rather, we make ourselves into new kinds ofpeople by inventing new forms of human life. We make progress by having morealtematives to consider. We are as trapped in our time and place as Genghis Kbanwas in bis, but we know mucb more about the possibilities open to buman beingsthan he did. Our descendants will, if civilization endures, be familiar with manymore sucb possibilities. They will thereby bave become wiser, and morally better,tban we ourselves.

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Anyone wbo holds the view of moral progress I bave been offering will be du-bious about the relevance of training in tbe academic discipline of philosophy toapplied ethics. People witb views like mine are inclined to see training in philosophyas no better or worse a preparation for work in business etbics, or in bio-medicalethics, tban training in antbropology, or social psycbology, or theology, or intel-lectual history, or comparative literature. For advanced study in any of these fieldshelps the student to envisage new possibilities.

In thinking about the relevance of philosophy to applied ethics, it helps toremember what people wbo take a PhD in philosophy actually leam. Typically,they bave to take courses and pass examinations in four tields. The first of these isusually labeled "metapbysics and epistemology." Tbis term is interpreted so as tocover pbilosopby of language and pbilosopby of mind—two specialties frequentlydescribed as "the core areas of philosophy." The other three fields, typically treatedas peripheral, are logic, the history of philosophy, and etbics.

We philosophers share symbolic logic with the mathematicians, the history ofphilosophy with the intellectual historians, and ethics witb practically every otherdiscipline in humanities and tbe social sciences. The logicians talk mostly with eachother, and rarely with specialists in any of the other philosophical sub-fields. Thebest bistorians of philosophy are tbe ones who spend most of their time readingbooks by non-philosophers—books that fill them in on tbe political, social, andcultural background of the great dead philosophers about whom they write. Whenit comes to ethics, about balf of those wbo specialize in tbis field spend at least halftbeir time reading books written by political scientists, law professors, and bisto-rians. Tbe other balf tend to specialize in metoethics—the study of metaphysicaland epistemological questions relevant to judgments of value, rather tban of tbosejudgments themselves.

Metaphysics and epistemology are no more relevant to applied ethics tban isastrophysics or neurophysiology. The same goes for metaetbics. Work in tbat sub-area of philosophy revolves around tbe question "What is the place of value in aworld of physical particles?" It is dominated by debates between tbose wbo tbinkthat true moral judgments are made tme by something real and those who do not.

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But that dispute is as irrelevant to any practical issue as the dispute between thosewho claim that free will is an illusion and those who claim that it is real.

Philosophy professors who take an interest in metaethics typically describethemselves as "naturalists." One of them, Philip Pettit, describes his fellow natural-ists as holding that "A naturalistic, more or less mechanical image of the universe isimposed on us by cumulative development in physics, biology and neuroscience, andthis challenges us to look for where in that world there can be room for phenomena. . . [such as] consciousness, freedom, responsibility, goodness, virtue and the like."The difficulty of this question, Pettit continues, makes "philosophy today probablymore challenging, and more difficult, than it has ever been."^

Naturalists like Pettit see the contemporary Anglophone philosophical commu-nity as split between naturalists and quietists. People like me think that we shouldtry to move out from under Plato's shadow, and stop worrying about the nature ofreality or the possibility of knowing the true nature of the real. Brian Leiter accu-rately describes the position of Wittgensteinian quietists like myself when he writesthat, on their view, "Philosophy has no distinctive methods and philosophy cansolve no problems; philosophy becomes a kind of therapy, dissolving philosophicalproblems rather than solving them. One way it dissolves them is through the historyof philosophy, which shows us how we came to think there were such things asphilosophical problems and philosophical methods in the first place."'

That is a good description of my own metaphilosophical outlook. We quietiststhink that the main task of philosophy these days should be to complete the processof secularizing culture—to convince people to stop looking for God-surrogates.We hope that they will stop identifying moral duty with obedience either to divinecommands or to what Platonists and Kantians think of as "the commands of reason."For us quietists, the right question is not "what is real?" or "what is rational?" but"what is it useful to talk about?" If talking about gravitational attraction helps uspredict the movements of heavenly bodies, then there is no point in asking whethergravity is a real entity or a heuristic fiction. If the Helsinki Declaration of HumanRights seems likely to form the basis for a global consensus about the limits ofgovernmental power over individuals, there is no point in asking whether humanbeings really do have the enumerated rights or whether rights-talk is, as Benthamsaid it was, "nonsense on stilts."

So when the naturalists profess puzzlement about how justice and fi-eedom fit intoa world made up entirely of electrons and protons, we quietists protest that ethicaldeliberation serves one purpose and talk about physical particles a quite differentpurpose. There is no reason why vocabularies developed for these two differentpurposes should mesh, and no need for them to be linked up.

On the quietist view, we need neither a theory about the ultimate nature of realitynor one about the scope and limits of human knowledge. So we need neither epis-temology in general or metaethics in particular. So if quietism replaced naturalismas the dominant mode of philosophical thought, the areas of philosophy presentlythought of as "core" gradually would wither away.

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What would training in philosophy look like after a quietist victory? It is easyto imagine elementary logic being handed over to the rhetoric and communicationdepartment, and advanced logic to the mathematicians. Then all that would remainof the traditional four fields of philosophy would be the history of philosophy andmoral philosophy. But these are the areas that are already least professionalized,and most thoroughly intertwined with other disciplines.

The history of philosophy is of little value when studied in isolation from social,political, and economic history. Moral philosophy that does not bear on questionsabout whether and how to change our political and social institutions is equallypointless. So, if we quietists eventually win out over the naturalists, there will belittle room for the idea of specifically philosophical expertise. The only distinctivecharacteristic of our profession will be that we philosophy professors will still havea thorough acquaintance with a particular set of great dead thinkers. Our knowledgeof Plato, Aquinas, Kant, and Mill will be deeper and wider.

Those of us who agree with Shelley that the great instrument of the moral goodis the imagination treat the great dead moral philosophers not as people who putforward theories that can be tested against the data provided by contemporary moralintuitions, but as people who helped create such intuitions. They did so by dreamingup new ways of living an individual human life, and new social Utopias in whichhuman beings might better flourish. Adopting this attitude toward the mighty deadwould mean reading Kant as having offered a way of coming to terms with Newtonand with the French Revolution while preserving all that was worth saving in Chris-tianity. It would mean reading Mill as having helped us realize that morality shouldstop trying to regulate sexual behavior and concentrate on the need for individualdiversity. It lets us see Mill's arguments against the subordination of women as amuch more important contribution to Westem philosophy than the refinements hemade in Bentham's original formulation of utilitarian ethics. We can stop treatingKant and Mill as mighty opposites, propounding incompatible moral theories, andview them as social engineers who tackled different jobs at different sites.

Let me now try to relate the point of view I have been sketching to trends ofthought within business ethics. The emphasis I have been placing on the role ofimagination follows a line of thought familiar from the work of Patricia Werhane.But I am inclined to adopt a more radical stance than hers. Werhane says that sherealized that "ignorance of moral theory and lack of moral reasoning skills" werenot enough to explain "why ordinary, decent, intelligent managers engage in ques-tionable activities and why these activities are encouraged or even instigated by theclimate or culture of companies they manage." This realization, she says, led her torealize that "something else was involved: a paucity of what I have come to label'moral imagination.'"" Her book argues that "moral imagination is a necessary butnot sufficient condition for creative managerial decision-making."^ I suspect that

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it may, in fact, be sufficient as well. I think of moral imagination not as a supple-ment to moral theory and moral reasoning skills, but as pretty much all you need.Although an acquaintance with moral theory may sometimes come in handy, youcan usually get along quite well without it. The principles formulated by thinkerslike Kant, Mill, and Rawls provide handy little summaries of various subsets of ourmoral intuitions.* Invoking such principles speeds deliberation, but it does little tohelp with the tough cases—the ones where intuitions conflict.

When it comes to "moral reasoning skills," I am less certain than Werhane thatthere are such things. The only skill I can think of that might fill the bill is theability to proliferate distinctions as needed. Such proliferation permits us to rein-terpret principles and rules so as to make them say what we want. Law schools andphilosophy departments both provide excellent training in distinction-drawing. Butdeveloping greater skill in this area is as likely to lead us to do bad things as it is todo good things. There is no teachable skill that will help you sort out your moralintuitions so as to come to the right conclusion. Neither law school nor philosophyschool can be relied upon to improve a student's moral character.

Werhane defines "moral imagination" as "the ability in particular circumstancesto discover and evaluate possibilities not merely determined by that circumstance,or limited by its operative mental models, or merely framed by a set of rules orrule-governed concerns."' I would argue that an increase in this ability is what hasmade us better people than Genghis Khan, or Aristotle, or Kant. We do not havebetter moral theories than these people did, nor are we more skillful at moral rea-soning, but we are able to envisage possibihties for human hfe that never crossedtheir minds. None of the three, for example, ever thought very hard about what itwould be like to have been bom a woman. Had Genghis Khan done so, the Mongoloccupation of Baghdad might have included just as much plunder, but perhaps notquite so much rape. Had Kant been able to take Mary Wollstonecraft's book seri-ously, women might not have had to wait quite so long to get the vote.

I have argued in the past'* that an increase in benevolence—^in willingness to take theneeds of others into account—is possible only when people have enough security andleisure to imagine what it must be like to be someone quite different from themselves,or in a very different situation than their own. Such exercises in imaginative sympathyhave been essential to moral progress. Consider what happened when men began tothitik about what it must be like to be a woman, masters to put themselves in the shoesof slaves, owners in the shoes of workers, and straights in the shoes of gays.

Except for the odd sociopath, we all feel mildly benevolent toward somepeople—the people most like ourselves. We have no trouble treating such peopledecently, except when doing so would entail too great a sacrifice on our own part. Butmoral progress occurs when benevolence is stretched to cover people whom thoseexercising power had never really thought of as members of the moral community.That stretching is the work of what Werhane calls "the moral imagination."

Whenever we widen the circle of people who we think of as "much like our-selves," we find ourselves imagining changes in institutions and practices that

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would serve the hitherto neglected needs of these newly enrolled members of ourmoral community. When they finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, some plantationowners began asking whether the economy of the South might nor survive the endof chattel slavery, and to envisage altemative modes of production. After readingDickens and Zola, some factory owners began to rethink their ideas about the rela-tions of labor and management. When they read Harriet Taylor, some influentialBritish males began wondering what it might be like to sit in Parliament next to awoman, or to accept punishments meted out by a female judge. Then they beganmusing on what might need to be done to make such novelties feasible. When—touse Werhane's leading example—corporate executives leamed about what AaronFeuerstein did at Maiden Mills, they began to revise their notions about how suchcrises might be dealt with.

Werhane's way of thinking chimes with Ronald Duska's claim that "Stories andhagiography will be the business ethics of the new millennium."' I take Duska to besuggesting that the principal products of the business ethics community should be,on the one hand, inspiring stories about business heroes, suitably complementedby horror stories about business villains. That view seems a plausible corollary ofWerhane's claims for the role of the imagination.

Instead of discussing definitions of the virtues or candidates for the role of auniversally valid principle, business ethicists might do better to think of themselvesas social engineers working on site-specific projects. The two most useful tools forsuch work, I suspect, are narratives, whether historical or fictional, and what LauraNash calls "context-specific guidelines such as the Sullivan principles.'""

The importance of drawing up such guidelines is, I should imagine, uncontrover-sial. But what Nash calls "the importance of narrative as a moral medium" may beless widely acknowledged. Yet I am sure she is right when she says that "The fieldof business ethics needs to explore and develop modes of story. . . . How else tounderstand the existence of Mexican slave labor in the middle of Brooklyn?"" Howelse, one might continue, come to understand differences in the relation betweengovemment and business in Germany, in Japan, and in China? How else mightone grasp the implications of what Joanna Ciulla describes as the mass layoffs, inthe US, of "middle-aged white men in suits by 'field-of-dreams' companies" likeAT&T and IBM.' How else understand the relation between capital and labor inthe contemporary US—a country in which eleven million illegals who are availablefor hire at ludicrous wages can claim no protection from the police?

Stories about crawling across miles of desert in the hope of making it to Los An-geles, or about what became of all those laid-off white men in suits, are essential tounderstanding the relation between contemporary American business and Americansociety as a whole. Stories about what happens to Chinese peasants who becomeillegal residents of Shanghai are essential to understanding the globalization of theeconomy. Such stories will do the same sort of work that was done in the past bythe novels of Dickens and Zola, not to mention those of Jack London, TheodoreDreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Ayn Rand, and Tom Wolfe. Executive autobiographies that

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are honest chronicles of events and decisions, rather than mere public relations ex-ercises, serve tbe same purposes. So do corporate histories. For whether a narrativeis historical or fictional does not matter as much as whether it enables the readerto put herself in tbe shoes botb of those making difficult business decisions and ofthose affected by such decisions.

The business etbics community, I suspect, does not need people witb a tborougbknowledge of moral theory as mucb as it needs people who have a joumaUst's nose fora good story, and a novelist's talent at spinning it. No particular training is required todig out and to narrate such stories. So I doubt tbat it matters whether a business etbiciststarts adult life as an accountant or an anthropologist, as a congressional staffer or aclassical philologist, as assistant to a regional sales manager or as a PhD in philosophy.Just as hospital ethics committees now include MDs, RNs, MBAs, and PbDs in everydiscipline under the sun, so the business etbics community should welcome peoplewith as many different backgrounds as possible. I can sum up my answer to my titlequestion by saying: philosophy is as relevant as lots of other academic disciplines toapplied ethics, and perhaps a little more than most, but not much more.

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I would like to close my remarks by glossing a few sentences from Ed Hartman'sOrganizational Ethics and the Good Life. Given what I have said already, it is obvi-ous tbat I agree witb Hartman when he says "some of our central ethical principlesare more ephemeral than we may have supposed; tbey depend on how people aremotivated and will change as people's motivation changes. Over time saints andartists and philosophers and managers too will make us rethink what our interestsare."'' Hartman and I both make much of the fact that our sense of the possibilitiesopen for human beings bas changed as history bas rolled along, and will go righton changing, in unpredictable ways. Tbese cbanges will come from the creativeimagination, rather than from rational reflection or from empirical discoveries.

It follows fi'om this view tbat, as Hartman says, "If we want to know what tbe rightethical principles are, we must first know what the good community—not the ideal com-munity, but the best we can tbink of— is like." ''* I take this to mean that we first dream upa sketch of a better world, and only then try to formulate some principles which, if actedupon, might bring that world into existence. Rational argumentation about moral issuesalways lags behind. Reason can only follow paths tbat the imagination has broken.

It seems to me that tbe most difficult task that faces us at the present time is find-ing a substitute for the communist Utopia that Marx envisaged. Visions of that Utopiastirred the imagination of half tbe world for more than a hundred years. Millions ofhonest and brave men and women died trying to bring it into existence. Tbe collapseof communism has left us witbout any vision of comparable scope and power. Nobodynow bas doubts about tbe need for market economies. But the unfaimess produced bytbe operation of tbose markets is just as appalling as tbe Marxists said it was. Nobody,

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to my knowledge, has yet produced a plausible scenario in which this unfairness isgradually rectified, and in which social justice becomes possible on a global scale.

Justified resentment at this unfairness is quite likely to produce social and politi-cal chaos. The gap between the rich and the poor in the US is steadily widening. If itwidens much further, both American democratic institutions and American imperialpower will be in danger. But that gap is trivial compared to the one that separateseighty million middle-class Chinese urbanites, shopping till they drop, from eighthundred million Chinese peasants, living without hope. Yet both of these contrastsbetween social classes within individual nations seem insignificant when comparedwith that between the average life-chances of a child bom in either the US or Chinaand those of a child bom in the backwoods of Benin or of Bolivia.

The vast majority of the human race remains at the mercy of jungle capitalism.The sorts of horrors described by Dickens and Zola are still with us. Nothing thathas happened in the last hundred years would lead Marx to revise his dictum thatthe history of the human race is the history of class struggle.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, businessmen like Henry Ford imaginedways in which the US might become a relatively classless society. Some of those dreamsactually came true, at least for that bdef shining moment in US history that historiansnow describe as the Great Leveling. Ford, hke FDR and Walter Reuther, gUmpsed pos-sibilities for industrial capitahsm that had been beyond Marx's and Lenin's imagination.I hope that now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at least a few executivesof the great multinational corporations are thinking about the need to create a globaleconomy that will, far down the road, make possible global social justice.

These men and women are the people with the best sense of the directions inwhich economic forces are presently driving the nations, of where the real leversof power are to be found, and of the possibilities that remain open for both govem-ments and business enterprises. If none of them are dreaming up idealistic, Utopianscenarios for the formation of a morally decent global society, it is unlikely thatsuch a society will ever come into existence. Perhaps the business ethics communitywill provide an environment in which such dreams are encouraged.

Notes

L John Dewey, "Art As Experience," in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 10 (Car-bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 348. The quotation is from Shelley's "ADefence of Poetry," wiiere Shelley also writes that "The great instrument of moral good is theimagination."

2. Philip Pettit, "Existentialism, Quietism, and the Role of Philosophy" in The Future ForPhilosophy, ed. Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 306.

3. Brian Leiter, "Introduction" to The Future of Philosophy, 2.

4. Patricia Werhane, Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999), ix.

5. Ibid., 13.

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6. I have defended this view of moral principles in "Ethics Without Principles," an essayincluded in my Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002). See also"Trapped between Kant and Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy," in New Essayson the History of Autonomy: A Collection Honoring J. B. Schneewind, ed. Natlies Brender andLarry Krasnoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 195-214.

7. Werhane, Moral Imagination, 93.

8. See "Human rights. Rationality and Sentimentality" and "Feminism and Pragmatism,"both included in Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998). See also "Justice as a Larger Loyalty," in Justice and Democracy: Cmss-Cultural Perspec-tives, ed. Ron Bontekoe and Marietta Stepaniants (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997),9-22.

9. Ronald Duska, "Business Ethics: Oxymoron or Good Business?" Business EthicsQuarterly 10(1) (January 2000): 128.

10. Laura Nash, "Intensive Care for Everyone's Least Favorite Oxymoron: Narrative inBusiness Ethics," Business Ethics Quarterly 10(1) (January 2000): 283.

11. Ibid., 282.

12. Joanna CiuUa, "On Getting to the Future First," Business Ethics Quarterly 10( 1) (Janu-ary 2000): 54.

13. Edwin M. Hartman, Organizational Ethics and the Good Life (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1996), 111.

14. Ibid., 85.