Moral courage and manager‐regret

Bibliographic Data

ID21259352
AuthorsCraig Duckworth (0000-0002-6279-3099, London School of Business and Management, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume32
Issue2
Pages467-477
Publication date2023-04-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBusiness Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2694-6416 • E-ISSN: 2694-6424
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/beer.12501
OpenAlexW4309915234
LanguageEN
References cited56

It has been suggested that moral courage in the workplace supports more robust application of regulatory principles. A workforce with the courage to act on moral imperative, it is argued, can bolster corporate governance and promote both more stable business organisations and greater economic stability at large. Research in the area investigates the bases of moral courage, a central implication being that businesses should invest in ethical training as a matter of public policy. It is standard to present moral courage as the strength of will to do the morally right thing. From a managerial perspective, however, this distorts the normative character of the kind of issues managers typically face. Doing the morally right thing commonly entails inflicting permissible harms. Such harms, though permissible, can be a source of moral concern to the conscientious manager. A difficulty for the standard account, then, is that moral courage may be expected in scenarios in which the moral implications of the manager's action have not been fully assessed. In this paper, an alternative account of moral evaluation is presented that incorporates the concern around permissible harms. The basis of such concern is found to be manager‐regret . Building on this foundation, we can establish a new definition of moral courage, that understands the right action to be that which entails defensible harms, and requires courage because those harms will likely have to be defended. It should be recognised in the academic literature that moral courage has this intellectual dimension. Furthermore, managerial training and practice should reflect this understanding of moral courage if its benefits to public policy, in particular corporate governance, are to be realised. The thesis takes a novel approach to the topic that draws, centrally, on the work of Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Søren Kierkegaard

Business ethics · Courage · Engineering ethics · Environmental ethics · Law and economics · Moral courage · Moral disengagement · Political science · Regret · Sociology · Utilitarianism · Ethics in Business and Education · Law · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access