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The Separation Thesis: Perhaps Nine Lives are Enough

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

John W. Dienhart
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Abstract

Is business intimately related to ethics or can the two be separated? I argue that examining this question by focusing on how the two areas might be separated is logically flawed. Examining how business and ethics are connected, however, can bear fruit. This examination shows that business is a proper subset of ethics. Understanding this intimate connection has two practical benefits. It removes the seemingly incommensurable conflict between financial and ethical responsibilities of managers and it gives us new and positive insights into Milton Friedman’s view that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 555 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2008

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References

Notes

1 Quoted in Sandberg, Joakim, “Understanding the Separation Thesis,” Business Ethics Quarterly 18(2) (2008): 213–32 (214)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 As Sandberg notes, Freeman goes on to stipulate a definition of the Separation Thesis. As such, it is fair game for Sandberg. I do not dwell on Freeman’s version or Sandberg’s interpretations of it, as the point of my discussion is that the Separation Thesis is not useful to the practice and scholarship of business ethics, and should be abandoned.

3 Deposition of President Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky affair. Office of Independent Counsel, Monday August 17, 1998. http://www.cnn.com/icreport/report/volume3/volume373.html, retrieved May 25, 2008.

4 For the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter which version of utilitarianism we choose. The same point holds for the other ethical theories discussed here. Each theory has many versions, yet the point I am making about the relationship between them and the Identity Thesis should still hold.

5 Sandberg, , “Understanding the Separation Thesis,” 216, 227Google Scholar.

6 For more on this issue, see Frege, G., “On Sense and Reference,” in Meaning and Reference, ed. Moore, A. W. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Quine, W. V. O., “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Friedman, M., “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine (September 13, 1970)Google Scholar.

8 Friedman, M., Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

9 Douglass North elaborates on business being the value-creation institution and the inability of government and religion to do this well. See North, D. C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Jensen, M., “Non-Rational Behavior, Value Conflicts, Stakeholder Theory, and Firm Behavior,” Business Ethics Quarterly 18(2) (2008): 167–71Google Scholar.

11 For another novel approach to Friedman’s thesis, see Freeman, R., “Ending the So-Called Friedman-Freeman Debate,” Business Ethics Quarterly 18(2): 162–66.Google Scholar