Moral Principle

Moral principles are general statements that provide guidance in evaluating the moral appropriateness of past or future actions, general categories of behavior, individual character, and social and political institutions. A distinctive feature of moral principles is their intended aim of providing practical guidance. Principles direct or obligate moral agents to act or respond, either in general ways or in concrete situations where certain circumstances obtain.

Moral principles take various forms and vary in the type of practical guidance that they provide. The principle that one should “do no harm to others” functions as a general proscription covering a wide range of activities from how one ought to treat their neighbor to how much a manufacturer should invest in product safety. Although formally similar, general prescriptions establish conduct or arrangements that ought to be pursued as opposed to avoided. The principle “negotiate in good faith” instructs agents to exhibit transparent intentions when they choose to engage in negotiated agreements. Other principles function less like general recommendations or prohibitions and more like statements of conditional obligation. The principle that “No one should profit from wrongdoing” is an example of a principle that specifies the conditions under which it is permissible to pursue certain activities, for example, profit seeking, and, implicitly, when it is unacceptable to do so. Finally, moral principles can also take a procedural form when they specify how individuals or organizations should go about responding to certain types of problems. The oft-cited Principles of Stakeholder Management authored by the Clarkson Centre of Business Ethics provides a good illustration of this approach to principled moral thinking. The Clarkson Principles put forth a number of practical recommendations that do not endorse or prohibit specific kinds of action but indicate the methods that managers ought to use to go about addressing moral problems. For instance, principles such as “Managers should openly communicate with [Page 1430]stakeholders about their respective concerns and contributions” and “Managers should work cooperatively with other entities to ensure that harms arising from corporate activities are minimized” are essentially procedural in that they focus a manager's attention neither on specific outcomes nor types of behavior; rather, the principles recommend methods of responding that are intended to generate morally acceptable managerial decisions, whatever those may turn out to be.

The intended generality of moral principles makes their application in concrete circumstances a challenging task. To receive practical guidance from principles, agents need to engage in an elaborate process of judgment whereby the particularities of a specific circumstance are assessed in relation to the semantic content of a principle. The Clarkson Principles state that managers should distribute the benefits and burdens of corporate activity fairly among different stakeholders. To apply this principle in a specific circumstance, for example, in dealing with wage and benefit cuts for employees, an agent would need to address an array of pertinent questions. What are the unique burdens experienced by this group of employees? Are these risks in proportion to the benefits they have historically received? What trade-offs with other stakeholders need to be made if no wage and benefit cuts are made? What is a fair distribution of benefits and risks given that these employees have voluntarily accepted their position? Prior experience and sensitivity to all relevant facts help address these questions and, ultimately, enable a judgment about what changes to wage and benefit policies are called for by the principle.

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