Times of Insight: Conscience, Corporations, and the Common Good

<div>Introduction</div><div>• Career Overview</div><div>• Content Narrative (ToC) – The Very Idea!</div><div>• Business Ethics&nbsp;</div><div>1. Ethics to Business Ethics</div><div>2. Moral Projection and Corporate Conscience</div><div>3. Comprehensive Moral Thinking and the Institutional Insight</div><div>• Business Ethics Education</div><div>1. MBA Pedagogy</div><div>2. Executive Development&nbsp;</div><div>PART I:&nbsp; Business Ethics – The Very Idea!</div><div>Chapter 1.&nbsp; From Ethics to Business Ethics&nbsp;</div><div>• Historically&nbsp;</div><div>o There is a robust history of business ethics and corporate responsibility.&nbsp; Review my article Tenacity and my review of Abend’s The Moral Background&nbsp;</div><div>o Organizations, Rationality, and Morality:&nbsp; Some argue that organizations, and particularly businesses, simply cannot incorporate moral values into their decision-making structures.&nbsp; This challenge needs to be addressed before business ethics can get a foothold.</div><div>• Conceptually:&nbsp; The Moral Insight</div><div>o The Moral Insight and Transactions:&nbsp; Engages with Philosopher Alan Gewirth's helpful analysis of “ethics” in terms of transactions between “agents” and “recipients” in which the freedom and well-being of the recipients is at stake.&nbsp; This analysis proves very fruitful in addressing the foundations of business ethics.</div><div>o Normativity and the Challenge of Relativism.&nbsp; Business Ethics is (centrally) a normative discipline, engaging business decision making and behavior using a framework of ethical imperatives (interests, rights, duties, virtues)&nbsp;</div><div>Chapter 2.&nbsp; Moral Projection and Corporate Conscience</div><div>• Can a Corporation Have a Conscience?&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>o Agency: Define Horizontal and Vertical Extension (projection).&nbsp; Clarify the ideas of Teleopathy and Conscience, and the three imperatives (Orient, Institutionalize, Sustain) that accompany corporate conscience.</div><div>• Can a Corporation Be Morally Considerable?</div><div>o Considerability: Define Horizontal and Vertical Extension (projection).&nbsp; Discuss the relationship between legal-constitutional personhood and moral personhood in connection with the attribution of rights and civil liberties to corporations (Citizens United, Hobby Lobby).&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div><div>Chapter 3.&nbsp; Comprehensive Moral Thinking and the Institutional Insight</div><div>• Stockholders, Stakeholders, and “What Lies Beneath.”&nbsp; Here I argue the Necessity but Insufficiency of Stockholder and Stakeholder thinking, and the need for something deeper and wider.</div><div>• The Institutional Insight is defined.&nbsp; It calls for a more comprehensive kind of thinking based on human dignity and the common good.&nbsp;</div><div><div>PART II:&nbsp; Business Ethics Education</div><div>Chapter 5.&nbsp; MBA Pedagogy&nbsp;</div><div>Normative Discernment and the Case Method</div><div>• Business Ethics is a normative discipline and teaching it in an MBA curriculum calls for a normative framework (CAT Scan) in conjunction with the case method.</div><div>• Sample Case Studies&nbsp;</div><div><div>Chapter 6.&nbsp; Executive Development</div><div>• Here we examine several approaches to executive development that have been successful, beginning with an understanding of teleopathy and working through what I refer to as “hypocrisy exercises.”</div><div>• The Tenacity article and the Institutional Insight article indicate ways for business leaders to blend operating imperatives with the institutional insight at the foundation of business itself.&nbsp; And the “SAIP” tool is described as an approach for corporate self-assessment on integrating ethics within its decision-making.</div><div><div>CONCLUSION:&nbsp; Corporations, Conscience, and the Common Good</div><div>A. Summarize Parts I and II</div><div>• Business Ethics – The Very Idea!</div><div>• Business Ethics Education/Pedagogy/Executive Development</div><div>B. Revisit introduction or tie all ideas together</div><div><br></div><div>APPENDIX&nbsp;</div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div>