The Second Time Farce: American Business School Ethicists and the Emergence of Bastard Rawlsianism

Abstract

John Rawls is the most cited modern philosopher in the business ethics literature, and trails only Kant and Aristotle among the field’s icons. One might assume especially in light of recent controversies that Rawls’s popularity is a reflection of his concerns regarding economic egalitarianism, the rise of American militarism, and the connection of both to democratic institutions. Such an assumption, however, would be inaccurate, since he is usually cited in the literature for his rule-making heuristic, his “veil of ignorance.” Although his “difference principle” very occasionally appears, it is almost never applied to economic inequality, in keeping with the field’s almost total silence on this issue. This neglect of his central ideas can be analogized to the “bastard Keynesianism” that arose in the 1950s in the United States, which similarly avoided the most challenging and controversial of Keynes’s ideas. The difference, however, is that “Keynesian” macroeconomics had a measurable impact on American society, whereas “bastard Rawlsianism” has been employed in the service of a business ethics field that has not managed to generate any significance influence upon the non-academic world.