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The Infelicities of Business Ethics in the Third World: The Melanesian Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

David Lea
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Abstract:

In a recent paper Allen Buchanan makes a basic distinction between two types of ethical problems which arise in business: “genuine ethical dilemmas, in which the problem is to discover what one ought to do, when two or more valid ethical duties (or values or principles) conflict, and compliance problems, which occur when one knows what one’s moral obligations are, but experiences difficulty in fulfilling them due to pressures of self-interest or loyalty to group or organization.” Buchanan argues that most business ethicists believe that this simple dichotomy is exhaustive. He claims it is not and argues that there is a third area of concern that involves perfecting imperfect duties, or coming to “have definite ethical duties, where before there were at best vague ethical goals.” However, I wish to argue that there is a further area of concern in business ethics and this area does not involve deciding between competing moral principles, values etc, attempting to comply with known principles, or imparting determinate content to vague, non-specific imperfect principles of obligation (the subject of Buchanan’s recent paper). This sort of problem occurs frequently in the third world in circumstances in which the agent entirely fails to recognize the normative structure that underpins the considered options.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1999 , pp. 421 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1999

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References

Notes

1 Pacific Islands Monthly 66, no. 7 (Sept 1996): 23–28.

2 Allen Buchanan, “Perfecting Imperfect Duties: Collective Action to Create Moral Obligations,” Business Ethics Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1996): 28–41, 28.

3 Ibid., p. 28.

4 Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 174.

5 Ibid., p. 103.

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Amscombe (New York and London: Macmillan, 1969) s. 202.

7 The Kula Ring system of exchange and transfer as it exists among the Trobriand Islanders off the Southeast coast of Papua New Guinea, involves two kinds of articles, red shell necklaces and white shell bracelets. These kinds of articles follow a ceremonial pattern and trade route. Each kind of article travels in opposite directions around a rough geographical ring several hundred miles in circumference. The participants are permanent contractual partners who keep each item for only a relatively short time before passing it on to another partner, from whom he receives an opposite article in exchange. The items are not producer’s capital, being neither consumables nor media of exchange outside the ceremonial system. The ultimate purpose of these partnerships is to effect a network of relationships linking many tribes for social and possible military purposes.

8 P. M. Worsley, “Cargo Cults,” in Anthropology, Contemporary Perspectives, ed. D. Hunter and P. Whitten (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975).

9 Colin Filer, “The Bougainville Rebellion, the Mining Industry and the Process of Social Disintegration,” in The Bougainville Crisis, ed. R. J. May and M. Sprigs (Bathhurst: Crawford House Press, 1990).

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.; H. Okole, “The Politics of the Panguna Landowners’s Association.”

12 See ibid.

13 Ibid., Filer, “The Bougainville Rebellion, the Mining Industry and the Process of Social Disintegration.”

14 David Lea, Melanesian Land Tenure in a Contemporary and Philosophical Context (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997), p. 35.

15 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

16 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 85–92.

17 Ibid., p. 88.

18 See Walden Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle,” The Nation 266, no. 2 (January 12, 1998): 16–21; William Greider, “Saving the Global Economy,” The Nation 265, no. 20 (December 15, 1997): 11–18.

19 Ibid., Walden Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle,” p. 20.

20 See Jeffrey Nesteruk, “Law and Virtues: A Revue Article,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1995): 361–369.