Patricia Werhane (pwerhane@gmail.com), PhD, is Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois and Ruffin Professor Emerita at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. Previously, she was Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics in the Kellstadt School of Management at DePaul University, while also acting as Managing Director for the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. Werhane was interviewed by , JD.
A note on this series: In the last 40 years or so, an entirely new academic and occupational niche for practicing ethics in business has emerged. Many of the original academic business ethicists came to the field through philosophy, then brought their thinking and research into business schools. Many of the original practitioners came to the field through the law and remain close to the practice of law.
In an effort to preserve and share this knowledge and practical experience, the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business has filmed and transcribed the oral histories of these pioneers and early adopters. To date, almost 50 academics and practitioners have been interviewed, each with 25 years or more of experience in the field of business ethics. This series aims to provide a better understanding of how the business ethics field and profession have evolved over the decades, through the interviewees’ own experiences. For more details on the series, contact Gretchen Winter (gwinter@illinois.edu), JD, the Center’s Executive Director. This interview was condensed for clarity and brevity.
JD: How did business ethics get started?
PW: We began to realize in the 1960s that all the business scandals couldn’t be ignored. Many people thought that was “just business,” so we would just have to put up with it. And then we began to say that we didn’t have to make excuses for business scandals, and business didn’t have to put up with scandals, either. We can make lots of money and be ethical. There are many companies that make plenty of money and are as ethical as they can be. So, I think the field of business ethics got started when we applied the teaching of ethics to business scandals and failures—particularly those we learned about in the early 1970s.
JD: What’s your personal backstory? Why business ethics?
PW: I came to the field of business ethics fairly serendipitously. I was teaching philosophy and political theory at a very small college in Switzerland. When I came back to Chicago to teach at Loyola University Chicago (a Jesuit university), they asked me if I could teach business ethics. Well, I said yes. Which was frankly a lie. I figured if I taught ethics and political theory, I could do this. At the same time, my colleague, Tom Donaldson, came to Loyola, and they asked him the same question, and he had the same answer even though neither of us had any idea what we were agreeing to. The existing ethics course was required for all last-semester undergraduate majors, and they just hated it. So, we knew we couldn’t teach a syllabus that included only unedited US Supreme Court cases and a few philosophy articles that would make anyone go to sleep. We decided to teach real cases. In every single class. And, of course, the students thought this was really cool. We were new, young, and naive. Then a professor down the hall asked, “Why don’t you use a textbook?” We replied, “There isn’t one.” The professor said, “Just convert your syllabus. January 10 is chapter one, and January 17 is chapter two.” We sent it off to the publisher Prentice Hall, they accepted our manuscript, and we published one of the first anthologies in business ethics. It was pure luck.
JD: What did you hope to accomplish as a professor of business ethics?
PW: I was young and naive, and I thought that anyone who took our course would become very ethical in business. Then one of my students went to jail, so I knew something was wrong here. I had to change my expectations. I realized that there are always a few people who will never understand, and there are always a few bad apples. But most people are pretty good. And if I could raise the awareness of those people who were on the edge, they would start asking questions. If I could change even a few minds, that would be a decent accomplishment. Not a perfect accomplishment.
JD: Did your expectations change more over time?
PW: I had to learn that not everyone was going to be ethical. One of my students went to work for Enron, which he thought was just a terrific company. Even though he was with top management, he didn’t blow the whistle. That was disappointing. And there have been other students who’ve called and said, “Thank you, thank you. I’ve changed the way I do things.”
JD: What were some of the big questions when you began your research and teaching?
PW: When I first started teaching in the late ’70s, I told students that three of the big ethical issues were equal opportunity, diversity, and the environment. I predicted that by 2000, there would be no problems with diversity, we would all have equal opportunity, and we wouldn’t have to bother talking about it anymore. Women would hold the top positions. The commitment to people of color, climate change, and inclusion would be serious. What’s changed, of course, is that we are 20 years older. And just last night, a young woman came to me and asked, “How can I succeed in this male world?” The fight is not over. We have done some good work, but obviously not enough.
JD: Tell us about your three biggest contributions to business ethics.
PW: I have done a lot of work on Adam Smith, the 18th century political economist. Business people will think, “Oh, yes, he’s a free enterprise capitalist.” And he was, except Adam Smith also argued 200 years ago that justice was the very basis of all economic systems, and justice requires that we humanize commerce. I believe that understanding the connection between commerce and justice is one of my top contributions.
I am also proud of my work on mindsets and mental models—these are the lenses through which we look at the world. We can’t take in all the world at once, so we create a focus. The good part is we can do this well. The bad part is we sometimes miss a train that’s coming across the track. Our mental models focus our attention—and we become unaware of what’s happening elsewhere. We have to learn to look around.
And I think my third contribution is the idea of moral imagination. Once you look around, then you can step back and think carefully to take in another perspective. My theory of “moral imagination” is certainly what I’m best known for—to encourage managers to think, to look at what they’re doing, and stop and ask very simple questions. “What am I doing? Why am I doing it?” Maybe there’s something amiss, or maybe that’s good—and then try to think out of the box to consider a new point of view.
JD: What are some of the big questions still to be answered?
PW: I’m still interested in the questions, “What is an organization? What is its moral status?” An organization is not the same as a person, but I think you could talk about collective agency. So, if you think of a corporation as a collective agent, then it has moral responsibilities.
Another open question is the idea of the self in business. “Who am I? And who am I as a manager? And how could I make changes?” This is a concrete sense of the self and how the self can actually change. It is important for students to realize they don’t have to be mired in a particular organization, or in a particular way of thinking, or even a particular religion, or culture. They can work their way out of that.
The questions around diversity, inclusion, and the environment have not gone away. The good news is most organizations realize these are ethical issues, but they’re not quite sure what to do about them. One of the important things that business ethics has done is raise awareness. We haven’t made everybody good. We haven’t solved all the problems. But all companies are aware that they have ethical issues.
The third thing is that we have moved into a global economy. Everything we have, we wear, we do, is made in many countries all over the world. We are global, like it or not. So then how do we adjust our thinking? How do we adjust our thinking when we go into a new culture and still make some economic progress? And I don’t think we’ve done it very well quite yet.
JD: What do we know now about business ethics that we did not know decades ago?
PW: Even though managers don’t usually read our fabulous prose, we academics have raised the bar. Companies of all sizes throughout the world, and their managers and employees, know that ethical issues are part of business. We cannot underestimate how important this is. That’s why companies are so aware of equity, diversity, and environmental issues. So, we don’t yet have the answers on how to do it, but we’ve certainly done a good job in raising awareness.
JD: What business challenges will we face in the next 20 years?
PW: If you think about the economic world as a diamond, the industrialized nations are at the top, and there are these middle nations—Brazil, Russia, India, and China, collectively called the “BRIC” nations—that are moving toward the top. At the bottom are the desperately poor countries that I don’t know how we’re going to get out of poverty. I think this diamond is going to change to a reverse pyramid. And I think we’re going to see a lot of new countries on the top. The United States may not be part of the top tier. That is one of the reasons why we cannot continue to be so parochial. We have to be aware of that and think about that.
JD: Are Aristotle and Plato business ethicists? Should we include them in the canon?
PW: I wish I had a nice crisp answer. But most moral philosophy goes back to Plato or Aristotle. We can find ways to stretch their writings to fit today’s business ethics questions. For Plato, it’s the notion of the self. Plato talks about the soul. Now people don’t talk that way so much anymore. But Plato asked, “Who is the self?” Aristotle raised lots of questions about ethics and virtue: Who is a virtuous person? What is a virtuous company? Even what is a virtuous nation? These questions are always nagging us, even though they’re not addressed directly in business ethics. So yes, Aristotle and Plato are business ethicists.