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In Defense of a Paradox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Kenneth E. Goodpaster  and
Thomas E. Holloran
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Abstract:

Our approach in this response is as follows. In § 1, we try to identify accurately Boatright’s central claims—both about Goodpaster’s original paper and about matters of substance independent of that paper. In § 2 and 3, we discuss the plausibility of those claims, first from a legal point of view and then from a moral point of view. Finally, in § 4, we defend the concept of paradox (and, in particular, the Stakeholder Paradox) as a limitation on practical reason which is not necessarily to be lamented. In fact, we believe, some paradoxes are better preserved from rather than guided toward resolution.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 423 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1994

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References

Notes

1 We would like to thank Leo Ryan, C.S.V. for reading an earlier version of this paper at the Atlanta meeting of the Society for Business Ethics, August 7, 1993.

2 Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations, ALI (March 31, 1992), p. 179.

3 ALI Principle 2.01, p. 69.

4 Or a rule or policy permitting, requiring, or encouraging it—as in rule-utilitarianism.

5 We should add, of course, “subject to legal and ethical constraints” as the ALI document does (2.01), but the point is that these are constraints on the objective, not further objectives.

6 ”Corporate Vices and Corporate Virtues: Do Public/Private Distinctions Matter?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 130, No. 6, June 1982.

7 Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987).

8 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). Nagel wonders further: “The paradox is that this partial, perspectival respect for the interests of others should not give way to an agent-neutral respect free of perspective.”

9 As an aside, we find it encouraging that in the recent papal encyclical, Centesimus Annus, John Paul II indicates an awareness of the need for caution in depending too much or too little on “public policy” to humanize capitalism: “Can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress? The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.”