Avoiding the Separation Thesis While Maintaining a Positive/Normative Distinction

Abstract

While many scholars agree that the “separation thesis” (Freeman in Bus Ethics Quart 4(4):409–421, 1994)—that business issues and ethical issues can be neatly compartmentalized—is harmful to business ethics scholarship and practice, they also conclude that eliminating it is either inadvisable because of the usefulness of the positive/normative distinction, or actually impossible. Based on an exploration of the fact/value dichotomy and the pragmatist and virtue theoretic responses to it, we develop an approach to eliminating the separation thesis that integrates “business” with “ethics” while still permitting a positive/normative distinction, which we call “ethics from observation.”