CC BY-NC-ND
73
INTERVIEWS
Interview with Gabriel Abend: "The Moral Background Makes the Play of Life Possible"
ABEND, Gabriel —
Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University. Address: 295 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012-9605, USA.
Email: abend [at] nyu [dot] edu
Gabriel Abend, Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University, was interviewed during his guest visit at National Research University Higher School of Economics. He gave a presentation entitled, "The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics", based on his recent book of the same name. The interview was prepared and conducted by Elena Gudova, Ph.D. student and teacher at Higher School of Economics.
Abstract
Gabriel Abend discusses his interest in the sociology of morality and the main ideas of his book The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics [Abend 2014]. According to Abend, the business ethics discipline and its growing popularity at business schools deals not only with the tension between making money and being ethical, but with the preconditions which enable moral life: the moral background.
Abend states that studying moralities and moral action in the social sciences is usually viewed through the lens of the first one, behavioral level, and the second one, normative level (moral and immoral behavior and norms, respectively), which, taken together, constitute first-order morality. Abend also points out that the "moral background" should be suggested as the third level, or second-order morality, which underlies and supports first-order morality through six dimensions. These include: the reasons for first-level morality support, the existing concepts repertoire, the subject of the moral evaluation, proper moral methods, the objectiveness of morality, and metaphysical conceptions. Some of these dimensions have a society-level organization, such as the conceptual repertoire for speaking about moralities in different languages, and some dimensions have an individual-level organization, such as the objectivity or relativity of first-order morality.
Abend identifies two types of moral background that he describes as the "Christian Merchant" and the "Standards of Practice". The "Christian Merchant" type can be characterized as an ethics of being, developing certain features of character and moral objectivism. The "Standards of Practice" is an ethics of doing, which sustains moral relativism and emphasizes moral actions with no particular attention to their motives. The "Standards of Practice" type has found its way into business schools' curricula as a business ethics discipline that believes morality can be taught by using case studies. This approach, while maintaining the principles of corporate social responsibility, can have negative effects on society and the economy. As long as corporations suggest that ethics pays and act morally only to make a profit, there is a risk that without the payoff, they will stop acting morally. This fact causes questions to surface, not only about corporate
social responsibility and ethical behavior in business, but ultimately about values and the place of morality in society at large.
Keywords: business ethics; business schools; moral background; economic sociology; cultural sociology; sociology of morality.
— Gabriel, as for the beginning, could you please tell something about your background. How did you come up with the idea of business ethics?
— I think I began with an interest in the sociology of morality. I'd been long interested in ethics, in philosophical ethics, and at the same time I wanted to do something related to ethics from a sociological perspective. Then I was looking for an empirical site, for empirical data, where I could fruitfully think about the sociology of morality, what it would be like to study morality sociologically. I even had some other small projects at the time, as I was doing my Ph.D. For example, one summer I went to France to the National Library to look into the problem of moral education, how teachers teach children to be moral. At some point I realized that this project wasn't going to work out. So, eventually I came across business ethics as a thing in the business school at Northwestern University. I was not fully aware of business ethics before, I don't think back home in Uruguay I'd ever heard of it. I was surprised that there was a class in business schools called "business ethics". At the same time, I was starting to see companies talk about their social responsibility actions. I was learning about these things and I thought it was interesting because of the tension between making money and being ethical. That's probably what strikes you at the beginning. Why don't these companies try to increase their profits only, but instead they also care about the community—or that's at least what they're saying? This seemed to be a good area to study for a sociology of morality project.
— Is there a difference between social responsibility and business ethics? Because at some points they overlap, and at some points they are completely different. What is your idea about that?
— Well, there are two things here. The first one is how these expressions are used now in English. They have different meanings. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is more specific. The idea is that corporations have duties, which are social in the sense that they are owed to society and social actors. In a way, it is a positive thing that you need to do. You ought to contribute to and not harm the community from which you extract your wealth. It is specific about corporations, having specific kinds of duties, which they should do or should not do. Business ethics is broader and is also a discipline, so if you have a class in a business school, then it's going to be called business ethics. It will cover CSR and other things, which also touch on ethics.
The expressions have a history. You can find a lot of examples of what we would now call "corporate social responsibility" a hundred years ago, but you don't find the expression "corporate social responsibility." This is a fancier term that at some point in history came up. You can look at usage examples in different ways and in databases of books, newspapers, and see when the term emerged. "Business ethics" is older, but again, before the words "business" and "ethics" came together, people were talking about the morals of trade and commercial morality in the nineteenth century... This is all in the English language, but in other languages we need to look for other words. The subtitle of my book is "An inquiry into the history of business ethics" because it is the broader term, but I include in it corporate social responsibility, or at least what we mean now by it, projected onto the past.
— As you have touched the subject of your book, could you please introduce the readers to it? Main ideas, things that have inspired you, the method.
— This was a book long in the making; I worked on it for many years. One version was my dissertation in 2008, but the book really has very little to do with the dissertation. I have collected much more historical data about business ethics than what appears in the book or than I could ever use in my life.
When I started writing the book from scratch I had basically two aims. The first was to make a contribution to the sociological study of morality in general, so I wanted to address the sociology of morality and also other disciplines that concern themselves with morality. This includes anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and even economics in some parts of it. Basically, any scholarly activity that is interested in morality. I wanted to say something interesting and useful to all these people and not limited to business in particular. This part of the project I imagined as something that could be helpful whenever you were interested in morality. I call it the conceptual project, or conceptual framework. As for the other aim I had, that's the historical part of the project. It's a historical sociology focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century and first few decades of the twentieth century in the United States. This is where the historical documents are from; this is what the historical narrative is about; and so on. The way in which I give this account is through the lens of the moral background concept. I claim that the moral background is a tool for empirical research; for example, to give an account of the development of business ethics in the U.S.
Let me try to summarize these two aspects. The conceptual project makes a distinction between three levels of morality. There are people studying moral behavior and that's very important and good that it's being done. There are people studying norms, moral beliefs, moral institutions; I call that the normative level and there is a lot of research about that, too.1 And I want to identify a third level, which I call the moral background, and I say that the moral background is that which enables moral life, makes moral life possible. It underlies the other two levels.2
One metaphor that I use sometimes and some people find helpful has to do with theatre. When you show up to the theatre, the play starts at, let's say, 7:45 p.m., and the play begins. Assume that the play is the moral life. If your research focuses only on the other two levels, on the behavioral level and the normative level, which is actually what's being done, it is like focusing on what happens when the play begins. The idea of the moral background is that some things happen before the beginning of the play, which make it possible that the play takes place the way it does. The most obvious one is that there were rehearsals. But there are also material objects that were built in order for the actors to use, there was also the writing of the piece, and the lights put in the place where they are, and the stage that was designed, and so on. So, the moral background looks at all these things, which are perhaps invisible until you reflect on them. They are not literally invisible, because you can see them, but what is invisible is the fact that they were put in place beforehand. They are the conditions of possibility of the play's happening in the way it does.
In the case of morality there are basically six dimensions of this moral background3, the way I see it. I'll give you one example, the easiest to explain. It so happens that a community has a particular repertoire of moral concepts. It's like a menu of concepts that exist in culture, which you can make use of if you want. But you didn't invent them, they are given to you, and they shape what you can do. So, if you say that a certain fac-
1 On recent behavioral-level and normative-level research, see [Bazerman, Gino 2012; Hitlin, Vaisey 2010; 2013; Trevino, Nieu-wenboerN., Kish-Gephart 2014; Simpson, Willer 2015].
2 "The moral background is the set of second-order elements that facilitate, support, or enable first-order morality. By "second-order" I mean that they do not belong to the realm of first-order morality; they do not belong to the realm of moral claims, norms, actions, practices, and institutions. Rather, they are "para-moral" elements: they are ancillary or auxiliary to morality" [Abend 2014: 16].
3 These are: "(1) the kinds of reasons or grounds that support first-order morality; (2) conceptual repertoires; (3) what can be morally evaluated; (4) what counts as proper moral methods and arguments; (5) whether first-order morality is assumed to be objective; and (6) metaphysical conceptions about what there is and what these things are like" [Abend 2014: 17].
tory is exploitative, the concept of exploitation is something you are making use of, you're taking it from the repertoire. You can have discussions about it in a bar or in the congress of a nation. And many consequences follow from our identifying a certain factory, person, or behavior as exploitative, and obviously there are disagreements as to what counts as exploitation or normal work conditions. All these things are part of our moral life. People discuss, fight, lose; books and articles are written ... All of this is made possible by the fact that there is a concept of exploitation. The fact that there is a particular conceptual repertoire that we can make use of is a feature of the moral background.
What is important to say here is that not all societies, not all languages, have the same repertoire. There are hundreds of languages and historically there were many more, and not all of them have the same concepts. I don't want to get into to what extent that's the property of a language, like the Russian language, the Spanish language, and to what extent it's the property of a society or culture, and what exactly is the relation between the two.
This was just an example, something that in the theatre metaphor is happening before the play.
— What is the genesis of these concepts in different languages and the other five dimensions of moral background? Were they consciously constructed or was it just a reproduction of previous social order?
— It's true that these things are, in some sense, created, and it's partly true that they are not created by a designer intentionally. It's an interesting question, but it's better to focus on other dimensions of the moral background for this. So, one dimension is called metaphysics, and the basic idea is simply this: it is what the members of a society take there to be. For example, if you live in a religious community, you will take there to be a God or gods, but also that people have souls. And maybe if you live in a certain kind of community, you will take there to be something beyond the material objects and particles that physicists study. Any of these things, which fall plausibly under metaphysics, it's not that they were invented by a king or president, but something that has developed historically. In this case it sounds like it's not intentional.
I'll give you one more dimension as an example. There is another dimension of the background that's called moral method and argument. Take a certain society or community or group and say they have a discussion about a moral issue. Suppose they are discussing whether abortion is morally acceptable or not. There are only certain ways in which people can go about making a claim in the context of a moral argument. So, if you said, for example, let's just decide this by raising our hands, the response would probably be, "Look, moral matters are not the kind of thing where you just vote, like elections in democracy." This is just like in science: there are only certain methods that you can use. Moral methods are slightly metaphorical in that, it's not some formal procedure like the scientific method. Rather, if you don't do this, others will shrug their shoulders or look puzzled and say, "What are you doing?" So, that's another example. It's not intentional, it's just the development of institutions, the development of cultures, and so on, and only certain methods end up being valid. Again, I gave you an example where it sounds like it's not intentional. These moral background dimensions are in some sense the product of spontaneous developments.
— Spontaneous development of a single person or can you say they are applied by the society?
— We have to consider to what extent moral background dimensions are properties of individuals or properties of groups or societies. By which I mean, if you should measure it or observe it at the level of individuals, or you should observe it at the level of groups or societies, more in a Durkheimian way. And this is tricky, because I don't think the six dimensions of the background are alike.
— Can you give an example of an individual-level dimension and a society-level one?
— Let's start with an individual-level example. One background dimension is whether people take their morals to be objective or not, whether they take a claim about morals or a discussion about morals to have a right answer in the sense of, for example, who is at present the president of Uruguay. Here there is a fact of the matter. You may know it or you may not know it, but if two people make different claims about who is the president of Uruguay, someone will be mistaken. They may both be mistaken, but there is a fact of the matter and people would agree that there is a fact of the matter, which is not up to us. By contrast, consider the case of taste, food (though this is contentious). Suppose there is a disagreement about whether something is delicious or disgusting, say, Brussels sprouts, or mustard. Someone says mustard is the most delicious thing you can possibly add to your dish, while someone else is disgusted by it and says that it ruins whatever you are eating. These people don't think there is a fact of the matter about this: is mustard objectively delicious or objectively disgusting? They just take it that they have different feelings about mustard; it's a matter of taste. We have facts of the matter about who is the president of Uruguay and we have things that are subjective or opinions or something like that.
So, this dimension of the moral background asks: look at these people here, or look at this guy, this group, or this society, how they understand their morals. Do they think that their discussions have the same status as discussions about which there is a fact of the matter, so that someone is mistaken and someone is right? Or do they think that there is nothing to agree on because that is just a relative issue? It might be a good or morally good thing for you, but it's a bad or morally bad thing for me, and there is nothing more to talk about. The first group of people will be moral objectivists, and the second group might be either moral relativists or moral subjectivists. Now, is that a property of a society? Is that a property of a group? Is that a property of an individual? I think you'd have to say it's a property of the individual, because maybe in some society everybody agrees that these are morally objective things, but it doesn't need to be so. If you ask different people, some people would say that moral questions have objective answers, but some people would say that there are no objective answers. This is a dimension where you will have to look at individual-level variation. You don't want to say that the whole society is subjectivist; all you can say is that there is a majority, just like any other individual-level property.
— What with the issue of power in that situation? Because there can be opinion leaders or people who are in charge of resource distribution, for example.
— This is similar to the explanation of other kinds of belief. It falls within what sociologists of knowledge try to explain. It is in the interest of certain people and organizations that certain beliefs be held, and that applies to any kind of belief, including political and moral beliefs. You may find a distribution where some people believe A, some people believe B, some have belief C, and then powerful groups push for C, and there is a majority of the population that end up supporting that. But the property is still individual. The unit of analysis that you are looking at is individual. Then you add them up and it turns out that 80% of the people believe C.
— What about the society-level dimension?
— An example that I've already given may be again the easiest to explain here. A conceptual repertoire just can't be an individual property. It's not like you explicitly say, "Yes, there is this list," but rather, if you don't use a concept that makes sense in a particular context, people don't understand you. The repertoire is there and it changes over time. But however the process exactly is, at any given point in time, the repertoire belongs to the collective, to whoever are members of this conceptual community. It doesn't need to be a society as a whole. It's not necessarily a whole country or language. It might be a smaller social group, professional associations or groupings, or even academic, scholarly communities.
— Will it make them have their own moral background?
— You have to talk about one element or dimension of this group's background, they have a specific conceptual repertoire, they can use certain concepts that others can't.
—Mitchel Abolafia, when writing about brokers and financial markets, introduced the concept of "local rationality". The basic idea is that you may have as many local rationalities as you have professional groups, or special subcultures. But in the case of the concepts, if they have different concept schemes, will that make them belong to different moral backgrounds?
— You don't want to essentialize these things, as if it were, you have this moral background, you have that background. Look at it methodologically. Suppose you have a historical document, a text. You are a historical sociologist, as I happen to be in this book. You have a sermon that was delivered in 1910 in New York City. The text is printed, and we still have it, and we can read it. What happens in reality is that you can find within one person, even within one single text, elements that belong to different categories of moral background dimensions. People are not consistent necessarily. People are not philosophers, obviously, and you don't want to say this person belongs to this moral background, as if it was a box they had to be in. If you want to be true to reality, you want to say something like this. My book presents two types of moral background. You examine many historical documents and the same texts may have elements of both. Still, as a whole, one text may have more of one type of moral background than of the other.
— Could you please tell a bit more about behavioral and normative levels of morality?
— That's easier to explain. An example of research about the behavioral level is social psychology experiments that try to understand what makes people more likely to help [Isen, Levin 1972; Penner et al. 2005]. There is a tradition of research about that, and what we are interested in here is helping behavior; for example, helping someone who is in need. Another example: an ethnographer might go and observe with his or her own eyes to what extent people help each other, in which places and situations, which has the disadvantage that it's not a controlled experiment, but it has the advantage that it's real life.
— It doesn't limit to the biology, right?
— No, any behavior, in the sense of people actually doing things; this is not about thoughts and beliefs or anything in the mind. Take cheating from the behavioral level perspective. It's not what people say about cheating or what people believe about cheating, nor what institutions and laws are about cheating, but whether, how much, where, who is more likely to cheat, and why.
— What about the normative level?
— The normative level includes a few more things in it. It includes individuals' moral views or moral convictions, or you may say their moral beliefs, or even moral values if you like that terminology. An example of a normative-level research project: you ask people what are their moral views, on abortion for example, whether it's always wrong, sometimes wrong, etc. And why they think it is wrong, which usually requires an extended interview. You are getting at what they think about it in some way. Then you may do research that tries to connect the behavioral level to the normative level, to see what the relationship is between what people believe and what they do. That's one part of the normative level: what are people's moral views or convictions. Another part is society's norms and institutions, which are in some way dependent on individuals. But you may believe, like Durkheim, that they are sui generis, so they go beyond individuals. They are more than the sum of individuals' views. If you were a normative-level researcher, you'd want to see in a community what norms exist, if people who go against them will be sanctioned. Other people will try to prevent them from doing things that go against the norms or get legal or social punishment for those who did go against the norms.
In sum, about both of these levels, normative and behavioral, there's a lot of good research. My argument is that something is still missing, another aspect of morality. That's the moral background level.
— You also distinguish two types of business ethics, the "Christian Merchant" and the "Standard of Practice". Could you please tell more about them?
— The book first presents a conceptual framework and then uses it to look at the history of business ethics in the U.S. It does so in several ways. One is focusing on the idea that business ethics is good business, that being ethical pays. But another one presents two types of business ethics from the moral background point of view. The difference here is specifically at the level of the background. This is important because at the level of firstorder morality, at the level of norms and prescriptions, they don't differ at all. All business ethicists will roughly say very similar things as far as prescriptions go. They will say, "Okay, you should do this, you shouldn't do that." They speak against different kinds of fraud and corruption, etc. But my argument is that although they are saying the same at the normative level, they differ at the background level. This can be summarized with this typology: one type I call "Standards of Practice" and the other type I call "Christian Merchant" (these are just the names I gave them). These types differ in all six dimensions of the moral background.
Here's one example of their differences. What is the central question that ethics in general and business ethics in particular are about? The distinction here sometimes is called a distinction between "ethics of being" and "ethics of doing". The way this shows up in the philosophical literature is this. When some philosophers or ethicists write a book about ethics, they will focus on action, what's okay to do, what you should do, what you shouldn't do. That's doing, what you might call the ethics of doing. Other philosophers are much more interested in what you should be or what you should become, if you are not that yet. The question is what kind of person you should be and then the emphasis may be on certain character features. They may apply to actions, but mostly apply to persons. That's why it is an ethics of being. Aristotle is typically thought of as the main example of the ethics of being, and some Christian ethicists and theologians are also inclined to ask these sorts of questions. For instance, you should be a loving person; so, the virtue of love should be developed. And they don't focus on specific actions and specific situations, these are not the main objects, this is not the central question of ethics. By contrast, if you look at modern moral philosophy, especially analytic, a very important part of ethics is about actions and situations. These modern moral philosophers start with situations in which there are two or more options that an agent may go for. And they try to figure out what's the morally right option and also how you would know that: what rule, what principles, what procedure the agent needs to follow to determine if she should go for A, B, or C.
This is the conceptual distinction between ethics of being and ethics of doing. Then, I turn to the history of business ethics, sociologically, and I find something like this distinction. There are business ethicists who focus more on ethics-of-being questions, which are more likely to be ministers, but not only. Whereas for others, such as many business school professors, you find a lot of ethics-of-doing questions, and not so much emphasis on ethics-of-being questions.
— Can we say that the issue is that you cannot teach how to be ethical; you can only teach how to do ethical things? That is the question of knowledge?
— I think that might explain why someone faced with the task of teaching a class that meets only a couple of times a week or a month will want to use concrete cases. And this makes sense. On the other hand, usually the people who are virtue ethicists, they tend to think that you need to be brought up to be a certain way. Character traits are more permanent and they need to be cultivated when you are young. It's too late when talking to students in the university classroom. They should be brought up in the right way in their families or primary schools.
There are issues that are more contingent in the particular case of teaching in business schools. This story has to do with the university itself, how the case method became a way of teaching ethics, why the case method was used in business schools in general, and where it came from. Which in turn has to do with the relations between business and law schools; there was an analogy between business cases and legal cases.
—Why should we care for the motives when a person or a company still acts ethical?
— Suppose you have the same action, and when you ask the person, "Hey, why did you do that?", you get this response, "Oh, because it's the right thing to do." But someone else responds, "Well, because I will make money out of it." The example here is usually corporate social responsibility. The question is if it was done because it's the right thing to do—to help these people here or there—or it's because more people will buy your product if they know you are doing it. You ask me whether it matters what reason they have to do it. I guess the answer depends on whether it matters to whom. Because if you are a legislator, if you are interested in this from the point of view of the state and the public good, the good outcome is already a good thing, you may or may not be so concerned about the moral foundations and motives of individuals. If you are an ethicist, it will depend on what kind of ethicist you are. The Kantian ethicist will say, "Look, this is just not right, not okay, the good action has to be done out of the right motives, otherwise it doesn't count." But if you are, by contrast, a consequentialist, which is a different school, you will not care about the motivations of the agent, you will be satisfied with the good consequences.
But I also want to say that if you are thinking from the perspective of the state and the public good, and you want corporations to be good, and businesspeople to be honest, then you may not be fully satisfied with actions that are performed from the wrong motives. The reason is that that's not very reliable. You may do something good, because it pays today. But if tomorrow it doesn't pay, you won't do it anymore. Moreover, there is the risk that people will not do good things but only pretend to do good things, which is a basic Machiavellian move. It's not important whether you are really good, but what is important is that everybody thinks you are good. But if people are doing it because they have an internal, a true belief that it's the right thing to do, their moral behavior is more reliable.
—There are situations in business schools where teachers might ask you to do this because ethics pays. But doing and teaching to do ethical things is also subjective... Is there any foundation, a common ground, except religion maybe or except some world values?
— First, one thing about your first point. It's true and it's important to emphasize that, as a matter of fact, what happens is that most business ethicists will not say that it's either from the right motives or to make money thereby, but both. So, as you're free to combine them, there is a seemingly very good solution for business ethicists. They can say, "Look, do this, don't cheat, help your community, care about your stakeholders, as people say these days: it's both the right thing to do and it will make a difference to your bottom line." So, great! It's the best possible world. Whether this is true or not is a separate question. This is your first point. I think your second point isn't a question so much for the sociology of morality as it is a question for metaethi-cists, for moral philosophers. There you might ask on what grounds there can possibly be an agreement about it. But who knows, maybe there is moral truth and it's not religious. This is really a philosophical question.
Durkheim was proud of making a distinction between what philosophers do and what sociologists do. This is in The Rules of Sociological Method [Durkheim 1982]. Another of the founders of sociology, Max Weber, emphasized the idea of scientific sociology. He couldn't tell students what they should do, what kind of life they should lead. This is a value question that sociology can't resolve. Yet, at the same time, the discipline of sociology has always wanted to have a normative impact on society, and that requires that you don't merely remain in the world of facts, but say something about how the world should be. For example, you may say
"Poverty is a bad thing"; "Inequality is a bad thing". And the sociologist can help you to redress inequality, make things less unequal, decrease gender or racial discrimination - all these things that seem to be in the realm of morality. But someone could potentially come along and say, "Well, no, discrimination is not bad." What you are going to respond then? I mean, you might say, "We all agree that it's bad to discriminate on the basis of gender and race." But this person will respond, "That's your subjective opinion." The history of sociology (and the social sciences in general) is marked by this tension. Trying to be scientific has seemed to some people to mean that you have to give up on values and ethical and philosophical questions like that.
On the one hand, sociologists of morality think they study moral questions and many of them take the standard scientific line, saying, "Well, I study values, I study philosophical ethics issues, but as a scientist, so I don't address these issues themselves." On the other hand, there is a movement, which has always been present to some extent, but in recent years in the U.S. there's been a group of people proposing what they call "public sociology". One of the recent presidents of the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy, is perhaps the best known, but there's been a bunch of developments in both the U.S. and Europe. Then the question came up: So, what is the philosophical or normative status of this public sociology? Are you saying that sociology can after all tell us what should be the case? Or are you merely trying to help with the means to obtain certain ends that were established elsewhere? Suppose a politician says, "Inequalities are bad, what should we do about it?" Because you are a technical expert, you advise them to redistribute certain things in certain ways. It's just a technical calculation, as if you were an engineer. Or, rather, are you saying that sociology itself or the social sciences in general can make a contribution to what societies' ends should be?
— How do you think an ethical person can survive in this unethical world?
— I don't know that I can answer this.
— Do you have any "recipes", suggestions? Or is this world not really as ethical as people may think?
— I don't know that. The moral background approach doesn't have much to say about this sort of thing. It's not that I don't have ethical views or that I don't have good grounds to believe them and even to try to convince other people. But it's not really related to the moral background. The moral background steps outside of first-order morality and focuses on the conditions that make possible certain ethical actions, beliefs, norms, institutions, etc.
— But if we all share more or less the same moral background, why some people are ethical and some people are not?
— That's another thing. The relationship between the moral background level and first-order behavior is not a one-to-one correlation or correspondence. Background elements don't force you to act in any way. They are rather the conditions that need to be in place before both ethical and unethical actions can happen. We can think about different kinds of moral background elements fostering different values, or what background variables make it more likely that certain kinds of ethical behaviors happen. But, again, this wouldn't be a necessary relation.
— Thank you very much for the interview!
— Thank you!
Elena Gudova, Moscow, 01.06.2016
References
Abend G. (2014) The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bazerman M., Gino F. (2012) Behavioral Ethics. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, no 8, pp. 85-104.
Dürkheim É. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: Free Press.
Hitlin S., Vaisey S. (eds) (2010) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, New York: Springer.
Hitlin S., Vaisey S. (2013) The New Sociology of Morality. Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 39, no 1, pp. 51-68.
Isen A., Levin P. (1972) Effect of Feeling Good on Helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, no 21, pp. 384-388.
Penner L., Dovidio J., Piliavin J., Schroeder D. (2005) Prosocial Behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, no 56, pp. 365-392.
Simpson B., Willer R. (2015) Beyond Altruism. Annual Review of Sociology, no 41, pp. 43-63.
Trevino L., Nieuwenboer N., Kish-Gephart J. (2014) (Un)Ethical Behavior in Organizations. Annual Review of Psychology, no 65, pp. 635-660.
Received: August 11, 2016
Citation: Interview with Gabriel Abend "The Moral Background Makes the Play of Life Possible." Journal of
Economic Sociology = Ekonomicheskaya sotsiologiya, vol. 17, no 4, pp. 206-215. Available at: https://ecsoc.
hse.ru/2016-17-4.html (in Russian).
