Moral Courage & Manager-Regret

It has been suggested that moral courage in the workplace supports more robust application of regulatory principles. A workforce with the courage to act on moral imperative, it is argued, can bolster corporate governance and promote both more stable business organisations and greater economic stability at large. Research in the area investigates the bases of moral courage, a central implication being that businesses should invest in ethical training as a matter of public policy. It is standard to present moral courage as the strength of will to do the morally right thing. From a managerial perspective, however, this distorts the normative character of the kind of issues managers typically face. Doing the morally right thing commonly entails inflicting permissible harms. Such harms, though permissible, can be a source of moral concern to the conscientious manager. A difficulty for the standard account, then, is that moral courage may be expected in scenarios in which the moral implications of the manager’s action have not been fully assessed. In this paper an alternative account of moral evaluation is presented that incorporates the concern around permissible harms. The basis of such concern is found to be manager-regret. Building on this foundation, we can establish a new definition of moral courage, that understands the right action to be that which entails defensible harms, and requires courage because those harms will likely have to be defended. It should be recognised in the academic literature that moral courage has this intellectual dimension. Further, managerial training and practice should reflect this understanding of moral courage if its benefits to public policy, in particular corporate governance, are to be realised. The thesis takes a novel approach to the topic that draws, centrally, on the work of Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Søren Kierkegaard.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Moral Courage & Manager-Regret, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12501. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited