Humanities and Business Ethics

Empirical Science and Normative Inquiry

Business scholarship has in recent decades been dominated by quantitative and scientific disciplines, and while business practice has in some respects moved beyond financial performance as the only meaningful indicator of business performance, it has not moved beyond the general prejudice that what matters to [Page 1082]business must be quantified. These attitudes are one source of tension between the humanities and business ethics, although it is notable that business management has been viewed to be as much an art as it is a science. Meanwhile, normative ethics scholarship suffered years of neglect, particularly by the American and British analytic tradition, for being speculative rather than scientific. These attitudes are another source of tension between the humanities, which often raise more questions than they answer, and business ethics, whose practitioners often desire moral certainty. Even among laypersons who share a regard for ethics as being practically important, there are widely divergent views as to whether ethics consists of a rational system of absolute moral rules or is instead radically subjective, circumstantial, and/or emotional.

These diverging views about business and ethics have contributed, not surprisingly, to a scholarly debate about whether business ethics is properly empirical science (and thus not humanistic in approach) or normative inquiry (and potentially but not necessarily humanistic) and, consequently, to a chorus of voices claiming that the two are complementary and perhaps inseparable. Traditionally, empirical science is defined as the study of what is, whereas normative inquiry is defined as the study of what should be. Within the terms of these definitions, the argument for integration goes roughly as follows: Strictly empirical research cannot, without normative context, help human beings by answering what should be done to improve on what is. Strictly normative research cannot, without empirical context, be related to practical matters of importance to human beings. Therefore, advancing business ethics scholarship and the related goal of moral improvement in business requires an integration of empirical and normative research methods. Still, this convergence of research methods leaves fundamental questions unanswered. Whereas business ethics has tended to focus on the moral question, “What should I do?” the starting point for Aristotle was the broader ethical question, “How should one live?”

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