Given the rapid rise of AI and its capacity to help firms customize consumer prices, price personalization has become a hot topic at the intersection of business ethics and technology studies. This article challenges the argument that price personalization would increase social welfare, addressing the claim that firms should charge more to people with greater willingness-to-pay (WTP), and less to people with lower WTP, because this will boost social welfare. I develop two reasons for doubt. First, preferences that influence WTP often do not conduce to consumers’ well-being. So, adjusting prices to preference-based WTP will not necessarily enhance social welfare. Second, firms’ long-term strategic agendas will often disfavor increased price personalization. If “ought implies can,” firms can morally be expected to do only what they reasonably can in competitive conditions.
This article advances a virtue-ethical foundation for the respectful and meaningful management of diversity and inclusion, grounded in the notion of human nature. Human beings share a common form of life that provides an objective and universal account of what is good for us to flourish. Yet human nature is also intrinsically open to diversity-an essential feature of our humanness, both a capability and a limitation. Responding effectively to the challenges of diversity requires cultivating three virtues: discernment (to evaluate beliefs and practices in light of human goodness), hospitality (to welcome others in and beyond their differences), and benevolence (to promote mutual flourishing). These virtues are especially practiced through dialogue and cooperative inquiry. Finally, human nature serves as a compass for navigating the tensions inherent in diversity-between separation, disparity, and variety-in ways that make the human experience of diversity an opportunity for individual and collective flourishing.
Organizations don't have a mind and can't have goals if we follow a microstructural approach that builds on methodological individualism. Yet, paradoxically, the existence of a normatively binding, shared organizational goal is typically a definitional criterion of what makes a group of individuals an organization. Building on the recent philosophy of social ontology, I answer this puzzle by demonstrating how agents within an organization believing in a shared goal make such a shared goal epistemologically independent, while ontologically emergent and dependent on individual beliefs. Through this collective belief, organizational goals become functionally real and normatively binding, and part of the most predictive theories to explain how individual agents behave in an organization. I also analyze how the deontic duties and rights of within-organizational roles aim to ensure that every member is either inspired, obliged, or channeled to engage in activities serving those goals, while also determining how much each member can influence the shared goals. This helps to bridge the micro-macro gap in organizational research by providing an account of the normative microfoundations for how individual agents come to adhere to organizational goals and together form a "group agent" capable of having goals and being morally responsible for them.
This paper explores the ontological relationship between descriptive and normative by drawing on the perspectives of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. Through Wittgenstein's concept of "grammar" and Heidegger's notion of das Man, we see that normativity shapes human perception and interpretation, making descriptive neutrality unattainable. Descriptions are always informed by norms and norms evolve by descriptions. This intertwined relationship has significant implications for business ethics, since ethical conflicts can now be reframed as lack of normative references. Ultimately, the paper proposes a perspective of moral perspectivism.
Organizational ethical culture, though widely studied, lacks conceptual clarity and precision with levels of analysis. To diagnose the specific conceptual and levels limitations, we assess the state of the science of ethical culture by analyzing 155 articles. Analysis revealed conceptual disorganization, confusion between the conceptual domain and nomological network, and imprecise treatment of levels of analysis. These limitations have resulted in downstream problems with building and testing theory; existing research is affected by unfalsifiable hypotheses, conceptual invalidity, contamination among measures, and incorrect levels-based inferences. To help overcome these limitations, we present a revised definition that integrates the dynamic model of organizational culture with the concept of ethical affordances. We present a multilevel model and describe potential interactions that determine how and under what conditions ethical culture manifests at relevant levels. We conclude with recommendations that will help future research move past these limitations.
