Abstract
Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has not been engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice.
Highlights
The politically contested nature of truth-claims and their manipulation via propaganda, ideology, and other forms of power, social construction, and knowledge production are a familiar mainstay of social scientific inquiry
Kidd (2017) notes that vice epistemology is devoted to three sorts of issues: first, to foundational issues concerning the nature and structure of epistemic vices; second, to studies of specific epistemic vices, such as epistemic malevolence (Baehr 2011), and other vices we examine below; and third, to applied vice epistemology, which explores how epistemic vices manifest in specific contexts, practices, systems, and communities
We have argued for the general importance of drawing on virtue epistemology to better understand the epistemic conduct of organizations and actors in organizational systems, in terms of contexts where claims to truth and knowledge are continually being expressed, renegotiated, and acted upon by epistemic agents
Summary
The politically contested nature of truth-claims and their manipulation via propaganda, ideology, and other forms of power, social construction, and knowledge production are a familiar mainstay of social scientific inquiry. A growing number of scholars have begun voicing these concerns (de Bruin 2013, 2015), calling for an ‘epistemic ethics’ (Buchanan 2009), and the development of theory around epistemic–ethical interfaces In this vein, the current paper draws on an important, under-examined contemporary development in epistemology that acts to lift the contrived divide between the epistemic and the ethical: virtue (and vice) epistemology. We seek to contribute to virtue epistemology in business ethics by paying equal attention to important vices as well as just focusing on epistemic virtues. To this end, the current paper covers five key areas. We conclude by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vices, with implications for organizations and managers responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice
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