Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Complete Guide to Ethics Management: An Ethics Toolkit for Managers. © Copyright Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. (This guide is located at on the Web.) The profession of business ethics has long needed a highly practical resource that is designed particularly for leaders and managers -- those people charged to ensure ethical practices in their organizations. Unfortunately, far too many resources about business ethics end up being designed primarily for philosophers, academics and social critics. As a result, leaders and managers struggle to really be able to make use of the resources at all. Also, far too many resources about business ethics contain sensationalistic stories about businesses "gone bad" or prolonged preaching to businesses to "do the right thing".
These resources often explore simplistic ethical questions, such as "Should Jane steal from the company? " The real world of leaders and managers is often much more complex than that. For Web readers: Disclaimer: 1. EPIC Online| Guide to Responsible Business Conduct. Jürgen Habermas. 1. The Early Development Of Habermas's Interest In The Public Sphere And Reason Born outside Düsseldorf in 1929, Habermas came of age in postwar Germany. The Nuremberg Trials were a key formative moment that brought home to him the depth of Germany's moral and political failure under National Socialism.
This experience was later reinforced when, as a graduate student interested in Heidegger's existentialism, he read the latter's reissued Introduction to Metaphysics, in which Heidegger had retained (or more accurately, reintroduced) an allusion to the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism (Heidegger 1959, 199). When Habermas (1953) publicly called for an explanation from Heidegger, the latter's silence confirmed Habermas's conviction that the German philosophical tradition had failed in its moment of reckoning, providing intellectuals with the resources neither to understand nor to criticize National Socialism. 2. 3. 3.1 The Theory of Communicative Action 4.
Responsibility We evaluate people and groups as responsible or not, depending on how seriously they take their responsibilities. Often we do this informally, via moral judgment. Sometimes we do this formally, for instance in legal judgment. This article considers mainly moral responsibility, and focuses largely upon individuals. Later sections also comment on the relation between legal and moral responsibility, and on the responsibility of collectives. The article discusses four different areas of individual moral responsibility: (1) Responsible agency, whereby a person is regarded as a normal moral agent; (2) Retrospective responsibility, when a person is judged for her actions, for instance, in being blamed or punished; (3) Prospective responsibility, for instance, the responsibilities attaching to a particular role; and (4) Responsibility as a virtue, when we praise a person as being responsible.
Table of Contents 1. The word “responsibility” is surprisingly modern. 2. A. B.