Godel, Gadamer, and Ethical Business Leadership

Abstract

The very phrase used to raise eyebrows. Even now, to many people it sounds like an oxymoron. Why? It is not simply that some business people are unethical and that many highly ethical people seem to have little business sense. Those points may be true enough. The biggest problem of business ethics is that our training for ethics and for business rarely even touch. On the one hand, business texts, in their analyses of supply and demand curves, projected market growth, and other theoretical studies, rarely if ever raise ethical concerns. Ethical issues are intentionally excluded. On the other hand, texts in both ethical theory and moral development often raise concerns for personal and social duties that have little obvious application in the business environment. As a result, to be an ethical business leader seems to require knowledge of at least two seemingly independent sets of concepts-those related to business and economics and those related to ethics. In addition, ethical business leaders need practical wisdom and common sense to know when to apply one or another set or both sets of concepts. Therefore, a personal finesse with at least two seemingly independent sets of concepts is required. There are exceptions to this seeming gap between business and ethics. Prudence is still an important concept for business planning; it is also a virtue in classical ethics. Cost/benefit analysis is another phrase that is common to both economics and some ethical theory-utilitarian ethical theory in particular. Nevertheless, these bridges between ethics and business are special cases, and the ethical theories they represent are debatable, to say the least. We also try to bridge the apparent gap in another way: through case studies, anecdotes, and other stories. This is often an effective way of