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Globalization and the Failure of Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Manuel Velasquez
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Abstract:

As the 21st century breaks upon us, no ethical issues in business appear as significant as those being created by the rapid globalization of business. Globalization has created numerous ethical problems for the manager of the multinational corporation. What does justice demand, for example, in the relations between a multinational and its host country, particularly when that country is less developed? Should human rights principles govern the relations between a multinational and the workers of a host country, and if so, which principles are the correct ones? How should a multinational deal with a government in which corruption is rife? What are the ethical considerations involved in determining whether and how to transfer a risky technology to a country whose people may not be able to safely absorb that technology? What kind of labor and environmental standards should a multinational adopt when operating in a country whose government legislates only very low standards?

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 343 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2000

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References

1 World Bank, 1999 World Bank Atlas (Washington: The World Bank, 1999), p. 52.

2 Padma Mallampally and Karl P. Sauvant, “Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries,” Finance and Development, March 1999, pp. 34–37.

3 Manuel Velasquez, “International Business Ethics: the Aluminum Companies in Jamaica,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5 (1995): 865–882.

4 Moral diversity is now not only a problem for the expatriate manager. Both because of the increased mobility that new transportation technologies have made possible, and because of the growing political, economic, and social pressures that increasingly motivate migrations across national borders, all of the world’s industrialized nations now encompass within their boundaries large groups of people from a variety of different cultural backgrounds. These cultural differences have inevitably made their way into local organizations, so that even managers of purely domestic companies must struggle with the problems of cross-cultural conflicts.

5 David Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Gilbert Harman, “Moral Relativism Defended,” The Philosophical Review 84 (1975): 3–22.

6 Norman Bowie, “Cultural and moral relativism,” The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics, ed. Patricia H. Werhane and R. Edward Freeman (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1997), p. 551.

7 James Rachels, “Can Ethics Provide Answers?” The Hastings Center Report 10, no. 3 (1980): 33–39.

8 Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 11–13.

9 Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 187–210; Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

10 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

11 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

12 Manuel Velasquez, “Ethical Relativism and the International Business Manager,” in Ethical Universals in International Business, ed. F. Neil Brady (NewYork: Springer-Verlag, 1996), pp. 15–26.

13 Thomas Donaldson, The Ethics of International Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

14 Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-related Values (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980).

15 See, for example, Jeremy Bentham’s classic statement: “The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation,” [1789], p. 18, in The Utilitarians (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961). Contemporary utilitarians continue this tradition, e.g., Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

16 John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” [1863], p. 468, in The Utilitarians.

17 M. H. Bond and K. Leung, “How Chinese and Americans Reward Task-related Contributions: A Preliminary Study,” Psycholgia 25 (1982): 32–39; M. H. Bond and K. Leung, “The Impact of Cultural Collectivism on Reward Allocation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47 (1984): 793–804; M. H. Bond, K. Leung, and S. Schwartz, “Explaining Choices in Procedural and Distributive Justice Across Cultures,” International Journal of Psychology 27 (1992): 211–225.

18 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 11.

19 See, for example, Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Boston: Belknap Press, 1996).

20 Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee, “Toward A Unified Conception of Business Ethics: Integrative Social Contracts Theory,” Academy of Management Review 19 (1994): 252–284.

21 Ibid., p. 260.

22 Ibid., p. 269.