Where the Facts End: Richard De George and the Rise of Business Ethics

Abstract

Not lost on most educated readers of Dicken’s Hard Times is that one of Gradgrind’s two youngest children is named ‘‘Malthus’’ and the other, ‘‘Adam Smith.’’ When Richard De George published Ethics, Free Enterprise, and Public Policy with Oxford University Press in 1978 (De George and Pichler 1978), academic business research was achieving the zenith of what might be called its ‘‘Thomas Gradgrind Stage.’’ And at that same time the nascent area now known as ‘‘business ethics’’ shifted stage abruptly from egg to larval; it had yet to undergo chrysalis; and it had yet to take wing. How remarkable it is that Richard De George not only doctored this novel birthing but also shaped its metamorphosis over the next 30 years. Philosophers, Richard De George one of the chief among them, began to hammer away at the anchor stones of the fact-based academic business enterprise. From 1978 onward the world of business ideas would never be the same. Richard De George played a prominent role in the seismic shift in the evolution of what we now think of as ‘‘business ethics.’’ Much of the story of this evolution revolves around a concept common to philosophy but only now becoming common in management theory: namely ‘‘epistemology.’’ It is a story of facts and values. Richard De George was one of the first to show management theorists that values could be discussed rationally and from a vantage point that was not entirely empirical. Oddly enough, one might compare the reactions to the nascent study of business ethics to reactions decades ago to the study of human sexual behavior. To be sure, in the popular imagination the first topic is crowned by a halo of supererogatory, perhaps even ‘‘impossible’’ idealism; while the second topic is weighted down by popular conceptions of ‘‘lower’’ instincts. But at least in their geneses the two fields shared striking similarities. Both at their inception were subordinated to the status of non-academic interest. Both were dismissed as popular topics, ones fit for media attention and casual conversation but not for high-level empirical and theoretical research. Both were subject to entrenched prejudices that covertly blocked inquiry. And both in the ensuing decades have proven conclusively how silly those prejudices were. In the US and Western Europe, the catapulting of both fields into serious consideration demanded singular initiatives, ones that galvanized the attention of serious researchers and pointed the way to their possible future. In the instance of sexual behavior, it was the Kinsey Reports, two volumes on human sexual behavior that appeared in 1948 and 1953 (Institute for Sex Research and Kinsey 1953; Kinsey et al. 1948). In the instance of business ethics, it was the launching of academic journals (the Journal of Business Ethics first appeared in the United States in February of 1982) and the pioneering work of T. Donaldson (&) The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 644 Huntsman Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA e-mail: donaldst@wharton.upenn.edu