Justifying Ethical Values: A Purposive Ethics for Managers

This essay addresses the question of how managers justify ethical values. Traditionally, ethical values have been justified by appeals to intuition expressed injunctively and judged to be obligatory. This tradition has led to ethical relativism and a widespread scepticism about the possibility of basing ethics on reasoning. There are, however, alternative strategies for ethical justification in which conclusions are derived deductively from purposive propositions. This essay revisits the notion of reason, purpose and ethical justification in management to outline a purposive ethics for managers. The implications for management practice and relevance for management researchers of such an ethics are presented and defended.