This is a book of extraordinary scholarly erudition raising important issues in the sociological study of morality. The book assesses a wealth of speeches and writings about business ethics promoted by the business community and its academic and religious affines (Protestant clergy) in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. This includes business association publications, speeches and editorials by business leaders, lectures and writings of educators founding business schools, sermons by protestant clergy, and codes of ethics of such organizations as the Chamber of Commerce. In its combinatorial theoretical and methodological architecture (content analysis, analytic philosophy, historiography), it is a tour de force.
Abend first proposes three levels of morality: 1) behaviors and practices, 2) judgments and beliefs, and 3) moral background (analogous, in my mind, to the concept of worldview or weltanschauung). He then argues that empirical relations among these levels must be discovered and articulated, not assumed. Two paradigmatic moral backgrounds are discerned for business ethics—Standards of Practice (secular and apparently scientific) and Christian Merchant (religious). In spite of these distinct paradigms with their divergent moral backgrounds, and in spite of vast changes in population, technology, financial practices and consumption patterns, he finds remarkable consistency in the content of business ethics discourse across time: be honest, do not cheat, lie or steal.
Early on, Abend notes tensions between morals and markets, ethics and capitalism when discussing Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor. Something alchemical clearly must be at work if maximizing self-interest produces societal benefits for all. But it is never entirely clear if The Moral Background, with its scrutiny of the relations between behaviors, judgments, motives, and moral backgrounds is equally interested in the way that business ethics ignores those fundamental tensions between ethics and capitalism.
For example, the book never explains what is meant by “business”. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the most common definition: “Trade and all activity relating to it, esp. considered in terms of volume or profitability; commercial transactions, engagements, and undertakings regarded collectively”. Trade and profitability are written into the very genetics of business. It is, therefore, puzzling that capitalism itself does not come into focus in a book about business ethics in the heyday of expansionary, some might say predatory, capitalism in the United States.
Another question regards the scope of business ethics. There are the obvious sins of dishonesty—unjust weights, measures, and materials, false advertising, defrauding shareholders through accounting tricks, cheating tax authorities, not abiding by professional norms. But what about ethical or unethical rates of profit? Is an ethical stance toward the workers central, peripheral, or morally irrelevant in the overt content and the moral background of business ethics? What about working conditions, wages, job security, or discrimination in hiring practices?
Despite its historical focus, the book does not attend to the turbulence of the mid to late 19th century US, with its immigration, urbanization, industrialization, unionization, Civil War, abolition of slavery and the subsequent transformations in capitalism. What might it mean to read about business ethics through the lens of the fundamental co-dependencies of capitalism and slavery in 19th century America? In historian Edward Baptist’s recently published book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, we find financial innovations like the creation of bonds using slaves as collateral, which enabled planters to borrow enormous amounts of money to buy land. These bonds were often backed by the state and, when speculative bubbles collapsed, it was the taxpayer who paid. This speculation on the backs––or homes––of the oppressed and disadvantaged is a familiar pattern, as we learned again in 2008. What did mid-19th century business ethicists (whether exemplifying the “standards of practice” or the “Christian merchant” model) have to say—or not—about such practices?
The question of moral motives is prominent in this book. But we find little morality in situ, no analyses of actual situations and the material life of business ethics (even in business school classrooms). Attention is paid to genre differences among the forms of business ethics discourse, including codes of ethics that were codified and displayed. Such analysis could have taken The Moral Background closer to the world of Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification, where situations are imagined in which someone might refer to such a posting in a justificatory moment of a situation of action.
Finally, there are social and political agents missing in action. Women’s voices are almost entirely missing. The historical period covered by The Moral Background was one in which the progressive movements concerned with abolition, immigration, women’s rights, child-labor, and factory conditions included many women’s voices––novelists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunday-school primer writers championing abolition such as Lydia Child, and social reformers such as Jane Addams. Hull House and the settlement house network generally had a major impact on issues directly connected to business ethics more broadly construed, including unemployment compensation, workers compensation, and child labor laws.
Moreover, the book’s rendering of a monolithically Protestant-inflected business ethics discourse requires explanation, particularly given the major waves of commercially active immigrants from Southern Europe and Asia during this period.
Expanding and extending the moral background of business ethics might, indeed, be the point of considering these additional protagonists and discourses. Perhaps the important accomplishment of The Moral Background is to have cleared the epistemological and sociological basis of the moral background of business ethics, exposing just how narrow the gateway to inclusion in its purview has been. The Moral Background discerns and details moral patterns in the echo chamber where business protagonists talk, mostly to each other, about ethical motives, obligations, and opportunities. Abend has done a yeoman’s job in excavating, analyzing, and systematizing the discursive surrounds of business ethics, pushing us all to think about who can and cannot be seen in the moral background.
