It’s Nothing Personal, It’s Just Business: Economic Instability and the Distribution of Harm

John Alexander

Business Ethics Quarterly, 2000, vol. 10, issue 3, 545-561

Abstract: Managers have the primary role responsibility to protect and promote the economic viability of their organizations. Utilizing a formula that demonstrates the inherently unstable nature of economic systems, I argue that managers are sometimes morally required to make adjustments that result in harming people who work for them in order to reestablish the equilibrium necessary to remain viable. The question of who is going to be harmed and how this harm is morally justified is the focal point of this paper. I argue that utilizing traditional methods associated with our common morality cannot solve the issue of who is going to be harmed, and that the traditional methods for reestablishing equilibrium promote a distribution of harm that cannot be justified from a rationally defensible moral point of view. Utilizing the constraint of impartiality and the concept of the health of the organization, I argue that an equal distribution of harm among everyone affected by the decision is the only one that is rationally defensible.

Date: 2000
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