The second of our Trinity term 2025 R:ETRO webinars – Reputation: Ethics, Trust, and Relationships at Oxford – hosted by Alan Morrison, Intesa Sanpaolo Professor of Business, Ethics, and Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and Rita Mota, Associate Professor, Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at Esade Business School, and an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.

Abraham Singer, Associate Professor of Management, Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago will be presenting:

The Institutional Structure of Business Ethics

A huge amount of what business ethicists do, in the classroom and in research, is demonstrate to a world fixated on instrumental, means-ends reasoning that morality and normativity are also things that can be reasoned about. Yet what are the reasons that are the stuff of business ethics? Abraham argues that such reasons ought to be informed by the place of business in a broader understanding of social institutions. They begin by offering a model of business ethics as a concept. On reading, business ethics performs three tasks: it provides institutional justification of firms – a moral grounding for their profit-seeking; it recommends a role morality for corporate offices – an account of the privileges and responsibilities associated with in-firm behavior; and it offers a critical basis for commerce– a standard by which the actual functioning of markets, firms, and people within them might be evaluated and criticized.

So understood, we see that this model of reasoning is not unique to business and can be generalized as a form of systemic nonpublic reason: a mode of reasoning that justifies the partial orientation of organizations and associations (due to its place in a subsystem), provides ethical limits to discipline behavior within those organizations (in order to realize the social goals this subsystem is intended to secure), and provides a basis for subjecting such subsystems and institutions to critique. They refer to a cluster of system, meso-level institutions, and role morality as a “playing field.” Given this, business ethics should be recognized as but one normative discourse, meant to discipline and guide the offices and roles of one playing field, among many other forms of systemic nonpublic reasoning applying to different playing fields (e.g. medical ethics, legal ethics, industrial relations, etc.). This enables locating business ethics within a broader social and political theory while taking seriously the distinctive forms of reasoning germane to it.

Please note that this seminar will be recorded.

R:ETRO seminar with Abraham Singer