The Challenges of Capitalism for Virtue Ethics and the Common Good

Studies from a variety of theoretical perspectives confirm that work organizations impact the development of employees’ moral agency. But how and in what direction? Rival answers to these and related questions include those who extol the bourgeois virtues required by market orders and those who regard business organizations as corrosive of the virtues. Empirical research into virtues in organizations has done little to resolve the issue. This paper will illustrate the dimensions of these disputes and attempt to diagnose their cause. It turns out that rival accounts of the impact of business on moral agency presuppose radically different accounts of those individual, public and common goods to whose achievement the virtues must be directed; or so I shall argue.