Postmodernism and Business Ethics

The postmodern perspective on ethics emerged as a critique of what Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, [Page 1644]has called the “Enlightenment Project” for justifying a human-centered system of moral sense making. In pre18th-century Europe, ethical norms served as external guideposts to help humans journey toward a preordained transcendental purpose, or telos, as revealed in the Greek concept of the good or the Christian vision of the godly life. The Enlightenment faith in science as an extension of human rationality undercut the dependence on the teleological assumption that an external “great chain of being” linking all life forms to a higher purpose could provide an external justification for the moral precepts that guide human actions. Thus, a selfconsciously modern justification for creating and maintaining a moral order requires a way to derive “universal” ethical norms from a shared capacity to reason. Postmodern ethicists, such as Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Rorty, would eventually come to question the modernist assumption that moral claims can be justified by applying various reasoning procedures to tap into universal truths embedded within an essential, unchanging human nature. Thus, Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative defines a procedure whereby a moral norm can be generalized to become an ethical principle that reasonable persons potentially affected by its application would consider fair to all concerned parties. Jeremy Bentham and the later utilitarians hold out the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” as the consequential measure of an ethical action. John Rawls extends a “veil of ignorance” as a refinement of Kant's procedure to ensure that the potential partiality of “reasonable persons,” based on their self-knowledge of previous circumstances, would not impair their judgment of what constitutes a principle of justice. Postmodern critics argue that such ethical rule systems pose the threat of external social control because their reasoning procedures ignore or suppress consideration of the particular contexts, contingencies, and paradoxical juxtapositions that can inform individual moral choices within local communities of discourse. A troubling consequence of this critique is the inherent difficulty of defining and justifying a postmodern ethic dedicated to ironic word play and a celebration of difference.