Adela Cortina: connecting business and ethics
Philosophers have traditionally focused their inquiries on the individual: Who am I? What can I know? How should I act? How do I relate to the world? How should I live? But the emergence of the nation state in the nineteenth century and the rise of different political and civil entities have caught the attention of a growing number of philosophers who have turned their attention to institutions and notably the phenomenon of the rise of the company, especially large corporate organizations that not only play a major role in our economies but influence politics, drive innovation, require talent, consume resources and impact on the environment.
In short, the company is the stellar organization of our times. Ours is a managerial culture and management is all-pervasive, affecting many areas of our lives. As Peter Drucker, one of the founders of the science of management, wrote in Forbes magazine: “There are, of course, differences in management between different organizations—mission defines strategy, after all, and strategy defines structure. But the differences between managing a chain of retail stores and managing a Roman Catholic diocese are amazingly fewer than either retail executives or bishops realize.”
He adds: “The differences are mainly in application rather than in principles. The executives of all these organizations spend, for instance, about the same amount of their time on people problems—and the people problems are almost always the same.
“So, whether you are managing a software company, a hospital, a bank or a Boy Scout organization, the differences apply to only about 10 per cent of your work. This 10 per cent is determined by the organization's specific mission, its specific culture, its specific history and its specific vocabulary. The rest is pretty much interchangeable.”
This recognition of companies as important social agents has had significant consequences, such as the development of laws regulating their commercial activities, how much tax they should pay or how they behave, the latter perhaps the fastest-growing area of interest. Companies and their representatives also have a growing presence in and influence over public bodies, both advisory and executive.
In the United States, businesses invest in election campaigns, which might be seen as recognition of their right to freedom of expression. In Europe, the European Union and its member states have implemented legislation establishing civil and criminal liability for companies. Courts can now find companies guilty of corruption, although obviously they cannot send them to jail. As the 19th century German jurist Franz von Liszt famously noted: "Societas delinquere non potest" (companies cannot commit crimes), because behind any criminal act in business there is always one or more individuals. Liszt was concerned with preventing executives who committed crimes from hiding behind their organizations.
Recommended by LinkedIn
One of the few philosophers to directly apply philosophical principles to the corporate world is Adela Cortina, a Spanish academic who has made a major contribution to the study of business ethics and corporate responsibility.
After graduating in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Valencia in 1968, she entered the institution’s department of Metaphysics, where she defended her doctoral thesis on God in Kantian philosophy. The early years of her thinking reflects the influence of critical theory, having spent part of her postdoctoral studies at the University of Munich. However, her later works, some in collaboration with other colleagues, including her husband and Professor of Philosophy at Valencia University, Jesús Conill, show the influence of the neo-contractualism proposed by John Rawls and other Anglo-American academics such as Ronald Dworkin. It is worth noting that until the last quarter of the 20th century most European university philosophy departments had a marked orientation toward German and French philosophy. The interest in Anglo-American philosophy is thanks to the efforts of a number of professionals who went against the mainstream.
Cortina became Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Valencia in 1986 and taught there until her retirement in 2017. During her career she has written extensively for a wider public, contributing to leading Spanish newspapers such as El País or Abc on applied ethics, the challenges of immigration, war or bioethics. She is also a member of government advisory bodies such as the National Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction and the Advisory Committee on the Ethics of Scientific and Technological Research. Her 2017 book Aporofobia - a term she invented by herself and refers to a fear of the poor - compares different types of phobias and proposes ways to overcome them.
________________
Note: An extended version of this chapter was published in my book In an Ideal Business