A central reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as
rational
and/or
autonomous
(RA). Recent nudge defenders have ...marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge their employees, they generally bolster their employees’ limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge defenders rely on equivocation between two different senses of “treating someone as RA.” The
value-preserving
notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to protect and enhance RA capacities is different from the
authority-recognizing
notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers.
Corporate Moral Credit Rozeboom, Grant J.
Business ethics quarterly,
04/2024, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When do companies deserve moral credit for doing what is right? This question concerns the positive side of corporate moral responsibility, the negative side of which is the more commonly discussed ...issue of when companies are blameworthy for doing what is wrong. I offer a broadly functionalist account of how companies can act from morally creditworthy motives, which defuses the following Strawsonian challenge to the claim that they can: morally creditworthy motivation involves being guided by attitudes of “goodwill” for others, and these attitudes involve affect and/or phenomenal consciousness, which corporate agents cannot maintain. In response, I show that what matters about being guided by attitudes of goodwill is being directly concerned for others in one’s practical deliberation. Companies can achieve this direct concern through their decision-making procedures without affect or phenomenal consciousness. I also explore how a company’s moral creditworthiness, or lack thereof, should shape stakeholders’ relationship with it.
Andreas Schmidt argues that ethicists have misplaced moral qualms about nudges insofar as their worries are about whether nudges treat us as rational agents, because nudges often enhance our rational ...agency. I think that Schmidt is right that nudges often enhance our rational agency; in fact, we can carry his conclusion further: nudges often enhance our self-governing agency too. But this does not alleviate our worries that nudges fail to treat us as rational. This is shown by disambiguating two conceptions of treating-as-rational. The more plausible conception of treating-as-rational undermines Schmidt’s case that nudges often treat us as rational.
When Vanity Is Dangerous Rozeboom, Grant J.
Philosophy & public affairs,
Winter 2020, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Unjustifiably expecting a higher form of regard from others than one deserves is a familiar vice, which elicits such epithets as "arrogant," "vain," and "entitled." Call this general trait the ..."vanity-vice." Vain people present a variety of problems. They are unpleasant to spend time with, they tend to be bad friends and colleagues, and they more generally tend to discount the legitimate interests and concerns of others. But Rousseau goes further when he discusses the dangers of vanity in Emile. He thinks that it is a uniquely dangerous moral vice.
How important is it for managers to have the “nice” virtues of modesty, civility, and humility? While recent scholarship has tended to focus on the organizational consequences of leaders having or ...lacking these traits, I want to address the prior, deeper question of whether and how these traits are intrinsically morally important. I argue that certain aspects of modesty, civility, and humility have intrinsic importance as the virtues of relational equality – the attitudes and dispositions by which we relate as moral equals. I provide a novel account of the normative grounds of the virtues of relational equality and develop a corresponding framework for how these virtues can be enacted by managers. The virtues are grounded in the value of opposing objectionable forms of social hierarchy, which requires social norms that grant all persons the same personal authority over their lives and interactions. I show how this view of virtue contrasts with prevailing Aristotelian, Personalist, and Smithian views in business ethics. I then explain how, for managers, sustaining and enacting the virtues of relational equality involves a distinctive cluster of role-specific traits: respect for employees’ equal personal authority, a commitment to express such respect, and a disposition to give equal weight and deference to employees’ relevant interests.
Why does respect for persons involves accepting that persons have responsibilities, and not just authority, for their lives and interactions? I show how we can answer this question with a role-based ...view: respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing others for a social role they occupy. To fill in a role-based view, we need to describe the practice into which the pertinent role figures. To do this, my account draws on the Rousseauian idea of inflamed amour-propre. Roughly, respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing persons for the role they occupy in a social practice that helps solve the problem of inflamed amour-propre.
The Motives for Moral Credit Rozeboom, Grant J
Journal of ethics & social philosophy,
05/2017, Letnik:
11, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
To deserve credit for doing what is morally right, we must act from the right kinds of motives. Acting from the right kinds of motives involves responding both to the morally relevant reasons, by ...acting on these considerations, and to the morally relevant individuals, by being guided by appropriate attitudes of regard for them. Recent theories of the right kinds of motives have tended to prioritize responding to moral reasons. I develop a theory that instead prioritizes responding to individuals (through appropriate attitudes of regard for them) and argue that it better accounts for the basic features of the right kinds of motives – what we most fundamentally care about in judging whether persons deserve moral credit.
The idea of respect for persons is supposed to play a foundational role in many non-consequentialist moral theories. A prominent Kantian version of these theories says that respect for persons is a ...matter of responding to the intrinsic value of rational agency and that, accordingly, our basic moral requirements are satisfied by this response to value. I think that this view faces two kinds of problems: it is liable to explanatory circularities, and it is unable to explain how paternalism is generally morally objectionable. My dissertation begins developing an alternative respect-based moral theory that solves these two problems by contrasting with the prominent Kantian theory in two key ways: it starts with an account of how respect for persons shapes our thought and action as an attitude in a certain social practice, rather than with an account of the intrinsic value of rational agency, and it sees respect for persons as a response to someone's authority, rather than to her value.In particular, in Chapters 1-2, I conceive of respect for persons as an attitude of accepting the authority that someone wields in virtue of occupying the social role of an adult, which I call the “Role-Authority View.” I show how the Role-Authority View improves upon the prominent Kantian theory’s conception of this attitude. I also argue that, even though there is some common ground between the Role-Authority View and Stephen Darwall’s account of respect for persons, we should take the Role-Authority View’s side in two important disagreements with Darwall. Then in Chapters 3-5, I turn to show how we can use the Role-Authority View to understand two basic aspects of morally good action: treating others as ends, and deserving moral credit. In doing so, I avoid mistakes made by prominent theories of these two aspects of morally good action, which include the common Kantian theory’s mistake of explanatory circularity. These mistakes have a common basis: a failure to develop an adequate account of the appropriate attitudes of concern and regard for persons. I explain how the RoleAuthority View paves the way for just such an account.
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