Patricia H. Werhane

DePaul University · Institute for Business and Professional Ethics

The ethical aspects of the operation of healthcare organizations (HCOs) are central to the delivery of health care. Organization Ethics in Health Care begins by assessing the shortcomings of clinical ethics, business ethics, and professional ethics as a basis for solving problems that have emerged in healthcare delivery systems since the advent of...

This article will defend a very simple thesis. In a diverse globalized world with expanding economic opportunities, pandemic risks such as the global COVID-19 virus, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we will need to revisit and revise our mindsets about free enterprise, corporate governance, and most importantly, leadership. That we can change o...

This chapter sets the stage by exploring a model for 21st century leadership, called ‘embedded leadership’. I begin with the assumption that notion(s) of leadership are socially constructed and thus can be reformulated to fit changing political and economic environments. I then argus that underlying the present global chaos is part of a larger macr...

This chapter provides an introduction to the second edition of Leadership and Business Ethics. It advocates an enduring relationship between ethics and business for human flourishing in commerce and society. Such a liaison depends directly on virtuous businesspeople and ethical business leaders. It necessitates the cultivation of conscience and dis...

Michael Walzer is one of the most distinguished political philosophers and social critics of this century. His ideas have had great import and influence in political philosophy and political discussion, yet very few of his ideas have been incorporated explicitly into the business ethics literature. We argue that Walzer’s work provides an important...

When there are disasters in our society, whether on an individual, organizational or systemic level, individuals or groups of individuals are often singled out for blame, and commonly it is assumed that the alleged culprits engaged in deliberate misdeeds. But sometimes, at least, these disasters occur not because of deliberate malfeasance, but rath...

In this chapter we reconsider Adam Smith’s works The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1766), for evidence of his Enlightenment contribution to responsible management in the twenty-first century. Far from being the poster boy of unregulated, neoclassical market economics as falsely idealized by Milton Friedman and others,...

This volume brings together a selection of papers written by Patricia Werhane during the most recent quarter century. The book critically explicates the direction and development of Werhane’s thinking based on her erudite and eclectic sampling of orthodox philosophical theories. It starts out with an introductory chapter setting Werhane’s work in t...

Despite the fact that even Karl Marx acknowledges a large debt to Smith for Smith’s introduction of the concept of free enterprise as an economic antidote to feudalism, Smith has nonetheless stood accused of being antilabor. For Marx, a worker is defined by and identified with her work and productivity. It is Marx who initiates the idea that worker...

In this paper Werhane analyzes what Michael Walzer (1973) has called the “dirty hands problem.” Here Walzer refers to the impossibility of being a perfectly ethical company while operating globally across complex political economies. Particularly at issue for Werhane are the ethical divergences arising from varying and competing cultural and religi...

In this article Werhane raises the question of whether non-persons such as organizations and corporations have basic rights, as recently argued in the United Nations Guiding Principles, referred to as the Ruggie Principles (2011). Developing a complex view of organizational rights as secondary moral rights, Werhane argues that the corporate obligat...

In the wake of the global financial market collapse of 2007–2008, Werhane and her co-authors Hartman, Archer, Bevan and Clark reconsider the issue of trust. Trust is considered here as invaluable and essential metaphorical glue in the smooth running of any globalized economy. The causes and effects of such a breakdown in this dynamic are identified...

This article, written with Calton, Hartman and Bevan, develops the position that poverty, globally, can be alleviated if not eradicated if Western industrial companies and other commercial institutions will form partnerships and collaborations in the emerging economies. These efforts are not intended to arise from any form of philanthropy. Indeed,...

In this article, written with Tom Wren, the authors set out to reconcile the traditional, normative foundational idea of human rights with a social constructivist point of view. Here, they argue that one can make perfect sense of human rights as social constructions without committing to the universalist position that human rights are a basic set o...

In this paper Werhane takes issue with a communitarian analysis of the self as a personality created solely by reference to the context of one’s community. A communitarian notion of the self explains how individuals change and develop their identity, or identities, throughout the course of their lifetimes. This can arise commonly as the result of n...

In this article Werhane and Simone de Colle discuss the implications of focussing on the moral motivation accounts offered by main ethical theories for improving the design of corporate ethics programs. Virtue ethics, deontological ethics and utilitarianism offer different criteria of judgment to face moral dilemmas: Aristotle’s virtues of characte...

Radin and Werhane, the latter of whom is known for her range of writings on the subject of employee rights, trace these rights to John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher, and his defense of the inalienability of the basic human rights to life, liberty, work and ownership of property. They summarize a defense of employee rights as derived fr...

In this article, written with Hartman, Moberg, Parmar, Englehardt and Pritchard (2011), the authors argue that one of the problems of obedience to authority as depicted in the Milgram experiments, and later reiterated in many managerial scenarios such as the 2016 Volkswagen scandal, is the lack of moral imagination as well as lack of moral courage....

Both Adam Smith and the 19th century Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, though in quite different ways, have been enormously influential in what is understood today to be free enterprise or capitalism. In this article Werhane examines the contributions of both, noticing that it is Spencer, not Smith, who advocates a “night watchman” theory of the st...

Using the examples of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle explosions, Werhane et al illustrate how smart, good-willed people and decent companies create or take part in flawed systems that produce untoward outcomes. The authors argue that the organizational causes of the Columbia failure demonstrated that little had changed at NASA to prevent...

Werhane focusses on reconsideration of gender character stereotypes and, in particular, on women in management and leadership, and how women deal resourcefully with the complexity of a systems approach. She tackles an analysis of women leaders, an approach that may be considered somewhat controversial in light of her neglect of gender characteristi...

In this article Werhane explores the chaotic system of public and private health provision in the United States, and the complexity inherent in mixing managerial and medical priorities across a range of interlocking professional and commercial interests. Almost all health care professionals work in organizations, and these organizations are often m...

In this article Werhane addresses the issue of the role of moral imagination in systems thinking and makes that link explicit. In her analysis of the social construction of organizations, she adopts a formulation identified from contemporary complexity theory, and considers companies or businesses as forms of complex adaptive systems. These systems...

This article is the precursor to Werhane’s full development of her theory of moral imagination. In this piece she espouses and develops the view that as managers we often get stuck or routinized in mental models or mindsets that we have adopted almost uncritically. That is to say, such managers may operate in a way that they are oblivious to import...

Following the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in this article Werhane argues that language is inexorably rule-governed. Indeed, it could not be otherwise if it is a form of communication through which we are intended to understand each other. This is not to conclude or interpret that such rules are a strict set of rules that we must follow;...

In this article, Werhane addresses those concerned with ethical reporting and decision-making, and demonstrates extensively how in taking a particular perspective we affect or color the reporting of an event or experience. Werhane uses the Japanese film, Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950), as the focus of her deconstruction. This film tells the story of an e...

In this essay Werhane et al expand a topic she first explored in “Why do good people do bad things” (2005). The suggestion here is that it may be easy to understand evil when it is done with deliberate intent, but it is harder to explain why good managers and companies with good reputations engage in questionable or aberrant behavior. Currently, fo...

Werhane challenges the arguments of leading economists, including Milton Friedman, that Smith extols the virtue of self-interest above other virtues, especially in the marketplace. Werhane is careful to explain that for Smith self-interest is a complex notion referring variously to (a) the object of a person’s interests which may be interests in ot...

Taking the initiative from Freeman’s note in his 1984 book, Strategic Management, that “[o]rganizations are complex phenomena and to analyze them with the organization in the middle … does not do justice to the subtlety of the flavors of organizational life” (Freeman, 1984; 2010, 216), Werhane suggests that there are many possible formulations or m...

In this article Werhane challenges a current preoccupation in much of the management literature with corporate social responsibility. She suggests the term “social” refers to corporate responsibilities to the communities in which they operate, while it largely ignores the importance of moral responsibilities of companies to their other stakeholders...

Werhane, joined by her co-author David Bevan, argues that Smith was not, as some have thought, a radical individualist allegedly eschewing social relationships as sidelines in our individual development. Referring to texts in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the authors demonstrate that according to Smith, “we are utterly social by nature and indeed...

Attacking the traditional claim instigated by David Hume that there is a clear distinction between facts and values, or the descriptive and the normative, Werhane argues that this distinction between descriptive—or, what is—and normative—or, what ought to be—is misleading. In business ethics, at least, not only do these two concepts themselves over...

Despite her fairly rigorous anti-foundationalist stance in her writings on Wittgenstein, in another of her early works, Persons, Rights and Corporations (Werhane 1985), a selection of which is reproduced in this chapter, Werhane endorses a foundational point of view by arguing that human beings, just because they are human, have basic inalienable r...

This volume brings together a selection of papers written by Patricia Werhane during the most recent quarter century. The book critically explicates the direction and development of Werhane’s thinking based on her erudite and eclectic sampling of orthodox philosophical theories. It starts out with an introductory chapter setting Werhane’s work in t...

This chapter comments on all the chapters in this volume with added introductory discussions on what Rorty called the “linguistic turn,” social construction, mental models and moral imagination.

One evening John Worthy, age forty‐seven, brought home information about the new health insurance plans his employer, Factory Inc., was offering. Factory had decided to offer a choice of health plans: GoodCare, a managed care plan, or GoodCare Prime, which had a point of service option. Those who wanted to pay more for it themselves could stay with...

An ongoing argument often made by business ethicists is that a singular preoccupation on profitability, will lead, in the long run, to disvalue for all the stakeholders and the communities it affects, and often (but alas not always), economic challenges for the company. On the other hand, we argue, a preoccupation with ethics and CSR as the primary...

As one of the leading contemporary founders and leading thinkers in business ethics, Richard De George has delved into many important topics. One of his more significant contributions is in the field of international business ethics. The contemporary thinking in business ethics began in the 1970s in the United States. However, because contemporary...

This text brings together case studies focusing on specific instances of corporate best practices. All too often, we showcase cases based on questionable or unethical corporate behavior. Instead, the editors bring together in this book examples of how some firms got it right. Certainly, there is no claim that the companies in these case are perfect...

This paper seeks to bridge the gulf between business ethics scholarship and management practice by exploring the links between two topics that have, to date, been neatly divided by what Freeman terms the Separation Thesis. The first topic is moral imagination, an issue of growing interest to moral philosophers and business ethicists. The second is...

This paper builds on London & Hart’s critique (2011) that C. K. Prahalad’s best-selling book (2005) prompted a unilateral effort to find a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Prahalad’s instrumental, firm-centered construction suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a buccaneering style of business enterprise devoted to capturing markets rather...

Much of the attention of ethics scholars has focused on the balance of self-interest with the interests of others, equating self-interest with profit, or at least on its acquisition, and presenting a dilemma to both companies and the stakeholder groups that socially responsible business practices might serve. We are in significant agreement with Po...

The global expansion of free enterprise has been underway for some time, and the challenges for global companies are well‐known. Companies often operate in economically blighted communities and in corrupt environments without a rule of law. At the same time Western‐based global corporations are under increasing public pressure to take on responsibi...

In this chapter we will focus on strands of two of the distinctive contribution that forms part of Robert Solomon’s legacy. The first speaks directly and explicitly to the field of business and business ethics. The second, perhaps Solomon’s most substantial and lasting potential contribution to applied ethics, arises from his work on a cognitive th...

Over the last decade, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown, there has been an erosion of trust and a concomitant rise of distrust in domestic companies, multinational enterprises, and political economies. In response to this attrition, this article presents three arguments. First, we suggest that trust is the “glue” of any viable p...

Much of the traditional literature on leadership ordinarily defines leaders as “… individuals who significantly influence the thoughts, behaviors, and/or feelings of others.” (Gardner, 1995, p. 6). The primary focus, then, is on an individual who will direct or influence a group of followers. This definition, in turn, is extraordinarily influential...

There are important synergies for the next generation of ethical leaders based on the alignment of modified or adjusted mental models. This entails a synergistic application of moral imagination through collaborative input and critique, rather than “me too” obedience. In this article, we will analyze the Milgram results using frameworks relating to...

When using cases to teach corporate strategy and ethical decision-making, the aim is demonstrate to students that leadership decision-making is at its most effective when all affected stakeholders are considered, from shareholders and employees, to the local, national, and global societies in which the company operates. This paper challenges the ob...

This book is a sequel to Advancing Business Ethics Education in the Ethics in Practice IAP book series. The focus on assessment in this second book is a timely response to the urgent search among business schools for ways to teach and assess ethics at a time when the public's faith in corporations and business schools has been undermined greatly by...

A proposal for a new framework for fostering collaborations across disciplines, addressing both theory and practical applications. Cross-disciplinary collaboration increasingly characterizes today's science and engineering research. The problems and opportunities facing society do not come neatly sorted by discipline. Difficulties arise when resear...

This book chapter reviews the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative. It puts a special emphasis on how to implement the six Principles in practice and what pitfalls might exist. It uses the Case of Thunderbird Global School of Management as a case example to illustrate how the PRME can influence responsible management ed...

The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technologic...

While no one seems to believe that business schools or their faculties bear entire responsibility for the ethical decision-making processes of their students, these same institutions do have some burden of accountability for educating students surrounding these skills. To that end, the standards promulgated by the Association to Advance Collegiate...

In 1999, the 20-year-old AIDS crisis had ravaged many developing countries and, in particular, on the continent of Africa. Of the estimated 33.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide in 1998, almost two-thirds (22 million) were in sub-Saharan Africa, considered the "global epicenter" of the disease. Already 12 million had died, and life exp...

This case focuses on the dilemma faced by Betty Vinson, a senior manager in the corporate accounting division of telecommunications giant WorldCom, when asked repeatedly to falsify financial information. The telecommunications industry was in a severe slump after the booming 1990s, and WorldCom’s stock price was suffering. WorldCom’s senior managem...

The Novartis Foundation and various donors undertook a risk-assessment of how REPSSI could be brought to other African countries both legally and effectively. The original initiative had to be transformed into an organization, and a host country had to be chosen to implement the program. South Africa, where the HIV/AIDS problem and its effects on c...

The increasing problems of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans and the perceived need for an innovative and creative solution to tackle the psychological, social, and economic needs of vulnerable children tipped the scales in favor of accepting sociologist Kurt Madörin’s proposal: Klaus Leisinger and Karin Schmitt of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainabl...

In 1998, Klaus Leisinger and Karin Schmitt of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development in Basel, Switzerland, were approached by a sociologist who wanted help in launching a pilot program in Tanzania to deal with the crisis of the more than 8 million HIV/AIDS-orphaned children in sub-Saharan Africa. The proposed program was unusual in th...

From the early 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century, multinational corporations (MNCs) had increasingly participated in the reduction of poverty as part of their business strategies. Such participation reflected an increasing awareness of the widening gap between rich and poor across the globe. McDonald’s Corporation, despite myriad criticism...

In 1995, Procter & Gamble (P&G) scientists began researching methods of water treatment for use in communities facing water crises. P&G, one of the world’s largest consumer products companies, was interested in bringing industrial-quality water treatment to remote areas worldwide, because the lack of clean water, primarily in developing countries,...

This note provides an introduction to moral relativism, discusses the various ways it poses fundamental challenges to engaging in ethical reflection, and offers alternative ways of thinking about ethics that avoid the trap of relativism.

Michael Pirron was a health care services consultant who had always dreamed of starting a "Nonprofit Competitive Business" with a social mission. In 2006, he launched Impact Makers, a new hybrid entity that crossed the nonprofit/for-profit lines. Although it was a small business like many others (paying competitive salaries, bidding for work, provi...

McDonald’s Corporation, the behemoth of the fast food industry, has taken its share of criticism--even ridicule--over the years. The image of the company suffered as the public began to perceive its jobs as dead-end, unskilled, and unstimulating. The term "McJob," coined by an author in 1991, was slang for a low-paying job that required little skil...

McDonald’s Corporation, the behemoth of the fast food industry, has taken its share of criticism--even ridicule--over the years. The image of the company suffered as the public began to perceive its jobs as dead-end, unskilled, and unstimulating. The term "McJob," coined by an author in 1991, was slang for a low-paying job that required little skil...

In 1999, P&G purchased--through the acquisition of Recovery Engineering in a $265 million deal--PUR Water Filtration System, a point-of-use water filtration system. The PUR water filtration system used a combination of the flocculant iron sulfate, an agent that caused particles suspended in water to bind and form sediment, and calcium hypochlorite...

Jim Zimmerman, executive director of HealthReach clinic, approached the Abbott Fund, one of the organizations that helped fund HABLA in 1992, about providing additional funds to continue the very successful and valuable medical interpretation program. The Abbott Fund agreed to additional funds for HABLA, pledging $100,000 to be split over two years...

In 2004, there were 50 million non-English speakers in the United States and an additional 22 million who had marginal English proficiency. Many had no health insurance or access to low-cost, affordable health care. This case describes the dilemma faced in 2004 by Jim Zimmerman, the executive director of the Illinois-based HealthReach clinic, which...

One of the few remaining producers of lead additives must decide whether to continue producing them for use abroad. Banned in the United States, lead additives were still legal in developing nations. Ellie Shannon, the division manager overseeing bromine production for the Indiana-based Great Lakes Chemical Corporation (Great Lakes), must advise Gr...

This case picks up after the end of "ExxonMobil and the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline (A)," presenting additional facts and advances in the story, and setting up a new challenging decision to be made about the project.

BHP Billiton, the world’s largest diversified resource company at the start of the 21st century, began a feasibility study in 1995 for building an aluminum smelter project in the Maputo province in southern Mozambique--one of the world’s poorest countries that was hampered by fragile legal, financial, and health, safety, environmental, and communit...

In 1999 and 2000, Abbott Laboratories’ senior management considered a number of philanthropic options that could make a difference and define the focus for Abbott and the Abbott Fund’s charitable programs. Although the cause was humanitarian, it was considered important that the programs align strategically with Abbott’s leadership in the HIV/AIDS...

BHP Billiton began construction of Phase 1 of the Mozal aluminum smelter in 1998. Because of the challenges that the community presented, BHP Billiton and its partners created the Mozal Community Development Trust (MCDT), which worked to improve the infrastructure, social services, and health care of the community. During the two construction phase...

The partnership between Abbott and the government of Tanzania continued to flourish. As a demonstration of Abbott’s long-term commitment to Tanzania, in 2007, the Abbott Fund opened its first office outside Abbott headquarters in Illinois. The new office in Dar es Salaam, led by Divisional Vice President Christy Wistar, oversaw the expanding number...

The question of whether ethical issues should be integrated throughout an undergraduate or graduate business curriculum is no longer relevant. To the contrary, it is instead the urgency of how those challenges are most effectively addressed and where to find models of positive corporate performance that occupies our current attention. While no sing...