Metaethical Theory Building for Individual Moral Goodness

Abstract

Organizations need morally good people. The field of management has a fundamental mandate to present clear guidance to managers on how to understand, assess, and measure individuals in terms of their ethical or moral qualities. I present two metaethical theory-building contributions. First, I introduce the assessment inference model, a multi-layer framework that illustrates the normative-empirical process of assessment. The framework gives due attention to the distinctiveness of the ethical domain and its inferential relationships with the empirical domain. Second, I construct the theory of embodied metaethics, a descriptive theory which establishes moral goodness as a concept that is pluralistic, intersubjective, and contingent due to the diversity of relations and contexts within organizations. By applying philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective of embodiment, I introduce metaethical dimensions that help us to typologize eight paradigms of moral goodness. I improve upon the limi...