MORAL AGENCY

RECONSIDIRED
Muh.Ferial Ferniawan
A031191156
 The Role of the Organization in Moral
Development
◦ The new Guidelines encourage business organizations to promote “ethics” and engender a culture of compliance among their
employees. Because of these changes, business organizations can no longer hide behind the claim that the ethics of individuals is
not the concern of the employer. The new Federal Sentencing Guidelines seem to suggest that the environment that is created
within an organization can somehow help to ensure that employees remain committed to ethical behavior. It is the responsibility of
the organization as a whole then to ensure that steps are taken to engender a culture of responsible behavior and ethical
compliance.It is not always clear exactly what the new Federal Sentencing Guidelines require organizations to do in practice. Its
recommenda- tions seem to be based on the assumption that an organization can identify and address the cause or origin of
employees’ unethical decisions and behavior. If business organizations are to respond in an appropriate way to the
recommendations of the new Guidelines, this assumption needs to be carefully considered. What is ultimately at stake here is the
locus of moral agency in the relationship between an individual employee and the organizational environment in which he/ she
works.Much research has been devoted to questions about the nature of an organization’s moral agency. In building their case that
an organiza- tion can act as a moral agent, some legal and moral theorists routinely draw parallels between the way in which
individuals and organiza- tions, as collective entities, make decisions.Those who oppose this view question the validity of such
comparisons. What neither side adequately considers, though, is whether the understanding of indi- vidual moral agency on which
they base their arguments is truly accurate. This is an important oversight, because it seems more than likely that this debate may
ultimately hinge on the outcome of exactly such an enquiry.Ethical decision making in the workplace is typically conceived in
deceptively simple terms – people and organizations think through ethical dilemmas, make decisions, and act on them.
Rethinking our understanding of how
individuals make sense of things
◦ Moral behavior is, at least in part, a response to the way in
which an individual perceives and makes sense of a situation
and the moral dir- ectives to which he/she is expected to
subscribe. Many business ethicists continue to work on the
assumption that an individual can gain a completely
objective, rational understanding of what is morally required
of him/her in a particular situation. A look at the approaches
some prominent business ethicists suggest clearly illustrates
their emphasis on deliberate rational analysis and emotional
detachment. Bowie describes being rational as essential to
moral agency.2 He explains that rationality entails the
utilization of the Kantian test of universality, i.e. that valid
moral maxims will be accepted unanimously in an ideal
Kingdom of Ends. He also explains that the ability to “see
future consequences” and to “reason abstractly” characterizes
humanity.
Rethinking “rationality” from the
perspective ofembodied morality
◦ What exactly does it mean to say that we expect of individuals in corporations to make
“rational” moral decisions? From the perspec- tive of the Enlightenment’s
“transcendental subject,” it means, as we have seen, that everything that may corrupt the
objectivity of abstract, syllogistic rationality should be eliminated. Considerations
pertaining to an individual’s private feelings, the caring personal relationships in which
he/she might be involved, the duties that he/she associates with his/her specific role in a
group or community, and the web of power relations in which he/she is embedded are
therefore rendered inad- missable. The same is true of elements of thought and perception
that emanate from the individual’s embodiment. The fact that human beings have
gendered, aging bodies; the fact that their physical existence is inscribed within the
concrete parameters of institutional settings and social conventions, all of this is seen as a
threat to rational thought. The introduction of variables such as these reveals differ- ences
in perspective and opinion that disrupt the orderly uniformity of modernist rationality.
Modernist ethics relies for its validity on the reconciliation of such differences in
universally valid normative principles. However, embodied, emotional agents, who carry
within themselves the biases of their own particular life-situations, simply don’t see the
world in a homogeneous way and therefore pose a threat to the notion of universal truth.
◦ It involves three consecutive phases:1) Becoming aware of social, economic,
organizational and personal factors that affect perception of a business problem and
understanding how these might conflict;2) Reframing the problem from various
perspectives to understand the potential impact of different solutions; and3) Developing
alternatives to solve the problem that can be morally justified by others outside the
firm.18