Research
Selected Publications. For a comprehensive list, please consult my CV
Maximizing Shareholder Welfare: A Normative Examination of Hart and Zingales’ Corporate Governance Account
Journal of Business Ethics, 2024
Link to read-only version (email me for downloadable version)
In response to the growing criticisms to shareholder primacy, Oliver Hart, a Nobel Economics Prize recipient, and Luigi Zingales, a very well-known finance professor, have offered a revision to Milton Friedman’s dominant account. Seeking to incorporate social and moral concerns into the objective function of the firm, they have proposed that managers should maximize shareholder welfare instead of shareholder value. Their account has been highly influential and reflects many of the substantive and methodological assumptions of corporate governance scholars within the law and economics literature. In this paper, we engage closely with their account from a normative perspective, unearthing and criticizing the implications of many of these assumptions. In doing so, we also formulate a set of principles necessary to ensure the ethical legitimacy of any proposal that puts shareholders at the center of the firm’s objective function.
Fiduciary Duties and Moral Obligations to Third Parties; a Reflection Through Shareholder Primacy
In: Research Handbook on Corporate Governance and Ethics. Edited by Till Talaulicar. Massachusets, Edward Elgar (2022).
At the heart of the traditional notion of corporate governance is the idea that there are certain individuals (agents or trustees) who are supposed to manage an organization on behalf of others (principals or beneficiaries). The main responsibility of the former is to pursue the interests of the latter. However, because the literature has focused its attention too narrowly on how the interests of the principals should be promoted by agents, corporate governance scholars have failed to emphasize (and sometimes even recognize) that agents are not only meant to promote the interest of principals, but they are also required to fulfill many of their moral obligations. In this chapter, I offer a general framework to identify the obligations that bind managers who are acting on behalf of shareholders. I show that to properly identify these obligations, the distinction between duties that afford latitude and discretion is critical.
The Normative and Cultural Dimension of Work: Technological Unemployment as a Cultural Threat to a Meaningful Life
Journal of Business Ethics, 2023
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The scholarship on meaningful work has approached the topic mostly from the perspective of the subjective experience of the individual worker. This has led the literature to under-theorize, if not outright ignore, the cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. In particular, it has obscured that a person’s ability to find meaning in her life in general, and her work in particular, is typically anchored and dependent on shared institutions and cultural aspirations. Reflecting on the future of work, particularly on the dangers posed by the threat of technological unemployment, helps us recognize this cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. I argue that a world with few work opportunities is a world devoid of a core structuring ideal around which our society has organized itself and, as such, will strain our ability to make sense of what it means to find life meaningful. To make this case I show that work operates as a central organizing telos around which our contemporary lives gravitate. Work touches everyone and everything, defining the rhythms of our days and weeks and providing a center of gravity around which our lives are structured. Work constitutes a central dimension of human flourishing. Through work we provide for our material needs, develop our skills and virtues, build community, and contribute to the common good. As such, work constitutes a central organizing ideal in contemporary Western societies, a fact has significant normative force and plays an important role in our finding work meaningful.
Malleable Character: Organizational Behavior Meets Virtue Ethics and Situationism
Philosophical Studies, 179(12), 2022 (with Joshua August Skorburg)
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This paper introduces a body of research on Organizational Behavior and Industrial/ Organizational Psychology (OB/IO) that expands the range of empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing character-situation debate. This body of research, mostly neglected by moral philosophers, provides important insights to move the debate forward. First, the OB/IO scholarship provides empirical evidence to show that social environments like organizations have significant power to shape the character traits of their members. This scholarship also describes some of the mechanisms through which this process of reshaping character takes place. Second, the character-situation debate has narrowly focused on situational influences that affect behavior episodically and haphazardly. The OB/IO research, however, highlights the importance of distinguishing such situational influences from influences that, like organizational influences, shape our character traits because they are continuous and coordinated. Third, the OB/IO literature suggests that most individuals display character traits that, while local to the organization, can be consistent across situations. This puts pressure on the accounts of character proposed by traditional virtue ethics and situationism and provides empirical support to interactionist models based on cognitive-affective processing system theories of personality (CAPS). Finally, the OB/IO literature raises important challenges to the possibility of achieving virtue, provides valuable and untapped resources to cultivate character, and suggests new avenues of normative and empirical research.
Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics.
Journal of Business Ethics, 175(3), 2022
Link to read-only version (email me for downloadable version)
Socrates’ inquiry into the nature of the virtues and human excellence led him to experience Socratic ignorance, a practical puzzlement experienced by his recognition that his central life commitments were conceptually problematic. This practical perplexity was not, however, an epistemic weakness but a reflection of his wisdom.
I argue that Socratic ignorance, a concept that has not received scholarly attention by business ethicists, is a central aim that business practitioners should seek. It is what a truthful, thorough, and courageous inquiry into their professional roles and commitments leads to. It wakes them up from the moral complacency engendered by organizations, forcing them to become much more critical of their day-to-day activities and more intentional about living virtuously. It curbs the corrupting potential of authority positions and prevents the tendency of subordinates to routinely conform to sanctioned norms and expectations. Finally, it opens up novel and creative moral avenues and provides a promising model to deal with the conflicts posed by our globalized and increasingly polarized world.
Why We Need Humanities in Business: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity.
In: Humanizing Business: What Humanities Can Say to Business, Ed. Michael Dion, R. Edward Freeman, and Sergiy Dmytriyev, Springer, 2022 (with A-J Aronstein).
Universities have seen precipitous drops in enrollments in humanities majors and corresponding increases in enrollments in business majors. Some blame the humanists for refusing to bow to the marketplace’s demands for quantitative, practical, measurably useful skills. Others blame their methodologies, which are plagued with ambiguity and uncertainty, making us skeptical about accepted truths and paradigms, and ceaselessly seeking to proliferate new possible meanings—many of which don’t hold together.
In this chapter, we will argue that business organizations undermine their own nature when they exempt themselves from considering humanistic questions about enterprises and the roles of individuals that comprise them. Businesses are constituted by humans and are ultimately meant to serve humans. As such, it is inevitable that they raise a host of difficult and complex questions that can only be considered from humanistic perspectives.
We also argue that the productive messiness that results from such humanistic approaches is essential to business activity and that their value emerges precisely from their insistence on the refusal of certainty. By their very nature, organizations should constantly examine and critique the concepts and measures of success that may be traditionally associated with business activity. This critique opens space to imagine and dream alternative ways to organize business, diverse in their theoretical grounds and varied in their aspirations. To embrace and understand the messy process of humanizing business would help bring to light what should, quite literally, be a marketplace of ideas.
Through New Eyes: Artificial Intelligence, Technological Unemployment, and Transhumanism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Klara and the Sun.
Journal of Business Ethics, 178(1), 2022
Link to read-only version (email me for downloadable version)
Socrates’ inquiry into the nature of the virtues and human excellence led him to experience Socratic ignorance, a practical puzzlement experienced by his recognition that his central life commitments were conceptually problematic. This practical perplexity was not, however, an epistemic weakness but a reflection of his wisdom.
I argue that Socratic ignorance, a concept that has not received scholarly attention by business ethicists, is a central aim that business practitioners should seek. It is what a truthful, thorough, and courageous inquiry into their professional roles and commitments leads to. It wakes them up from the moral complacency engendered by organizations, forcing them to become much more critical of their day-to-day activities and more intentional about living virtuously. It curbs the corrupting potential of authority positions and prevents the tendency of subordinates to routinely conform to sanctioned norms and expectations. Finally, it opens up novel and creative moral avenues and provides a promising model to deal with the conflicts posed by our globalized and increasingly polarized world.
Managers Should Satisfy Only the Ethically Permissible Preferences of Shareholders
Promarket, Oct, 2021
Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales have proposed a revision to the dominant model of the objective of the firm, most famously defended by Milton Friedman, arguing that executives’ obligation is not to maximize shareholder value, but shareholder welfare. Their proposal hopes to be more ethically attuned than Friedman’s. I argue, however, that as it stands, it falls short from an ethical perspective.
Which Duties of Beneficence Should Agents Discharge on Behalf od Principals? A Reflection through Shareholder Primacy.
Business Ethics Quarterly 31(3), 2021.
Link to read-only version (email me for downloadable version)
Scholars who favor shareholder primacy usually claim either that managers should not fulfill corporate duties of beneficence or that, if they are required to fulfill them, they do so by going against their obligations to shareholders. Distinguishing between structurally different types of duties of beneficence and recognizing the full force of the normative demands imposed on managers reveal that this view needs to be qualified. Although it is correct to think that managers, when acting on behalf of shareholders, are not required to fulfill wide duties of charity, they are nevertheless required to fulfill a variety of narrow duties of beneficence. What is more, the obligation to fulfill these duties arises precisely because they are acting on behalf of shareholders. As such, this article 1) refines our understanding of the duties of corporate beneficence and 2) helps to identify which duties of beneficence are imposed on managers when they are acting on behalf of shareholders.
Moral Imperatives of Humanistic Managements.
Humanistic Management Journal 4, 2019
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I discuss the nature of the moral imperatives that Humanistic Management seems to propose. In particular I discuss whether Humanistic Management should be seen as an inspirational invitation to reimagine how organizations could be conceived and practiced or as a mode of organizing which is mean to replace our current forms of organizing and which we have a moral imperative to adopt.
"From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Wisdom: What Socrates Teaches Us."
IEEE Computer 52(10), 2019 (with Tae Wan Kim).
Link to read and download the article (email me if you have problems with the link)
Engineers, especially engineering students, should have an opportunity to think deeply about the nature of human flourishing and human excellence if they want to be educated to develop good artificial intelligence (AI). The conventional approach seeks to design AI that avoids causing harm. But this approach falls short to the extent that it does not engage with the question "what is an excellent, flourishing, human being?" Socrates taught us two important things about this questions. First, that reflecting on it was a central part of being human. Second, that seriously engaging with this question leads to the recognition of a particular form of ignorance that is also a form of wisdom.
In this paper we will elaborate on these Socratic insights and will show how they bear on AI. We hope that current and future engineers will be moved to build upon the ancient wisdom discussed below to reimagine their work on AI.
Weeding Out Flawed Versions of Shareholder Theory. A Reflection on the Moral Obligations That Carry over from Principals to Agents.
Business Ethics Quarterly 29(4), 2019
Link to read-only version (email me for downloadable version)
The distinctions between what I call nonelective obligations and discretionary obligations, a distinction that focuses on one particular thread of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, helps us to identify the obligations that carry over from principals to agents. Clarity on this issue is necessary to identify the moral obligations within "shareholder primacy" (i.e., "shareholder theory"), which conceives of managers as agents of shareholders. My main claim is that the principal-agent relation requires agents to fulfill nonelective obligations, but it does not always require (and sometimes actually prohibits) discharging discretionary obligations. I show that the requirement to fulfill nonelective obigations is more far-reaching than has been acknowledged by most defenders and critics of shareholder primacy. But I also show that managers are not bound by certain discretionary obligations like charity, showing that their moral obligations are more circumscribed than the obligations that apply to human beings in general.