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MEASURING RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS BEHAVIOR

Buckley, Michael
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Buckley, Michael
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Keywords
Constructivism, methodology, manager responsibility, pharmaceuticals, Health Impact Fund
GE Subjects
Political ethics
Development ethics
Bioethics
Health ethics
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Business Ethics
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measuring_responsible_71.pdf
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/188705
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Abstract
A familiar question in business ethics asks: what metric should business managers use to assess responsible business performance? Typically, such questions are addressed from the top-down by first consulting general theories of business ethics such as stockholder or stakeholder theory. This paper develops an alternative, bottom-up approach to such questions by applying a constructivist methodology familiar to political philosophy. Specifically, I argue that four features of constructivism—(a) consensus on the fact-pattern of a given problem, (b) a piecemeal approach to ethical questions, (c) the recognition of ethical pluralism and (d) the framing of justification in terms of public interest remedies—facilitate a reversal away from top down strategies toward bottom up strategies for addressing specific business ethics questions. After defending this claim, I briefly illustrate the argument by answering the question: what metric should pharmaceutical managers use to assess responsible performance in the pharmaceutical industry.
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Conference proceedings
Date
2012
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With permission of the license/copyright holder
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