Order ethics

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The ethics of order is an approach based on business ethics and was developed by Karl Homann and Christoph Lütge . According to the ethics of order, the central normative question of the present is how moral norms can be asserted under conditions of pluralism and advancing globalization. The ethics of order relies above all on incentive-compatible rules. The ethics of order is based on contract theory in political philosophy and is thus in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Rawls (1921–2002) and James M. Buchanan (1919–2013). Significant influences also come from the Scottish tradition with Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Hume (1711–1776).

Ethics of order as an answer to the basic problem of modernity

The Enlightenment and the flourishing market economy produced unprecedented prosperity in western societies in the 18th and 19th centuries and realized a multitude of civil liberties. At the same time, however, this development has also led to two new societal problems from the perspective of order ethics:

1. The problem of pluralism .
With the Enlightenment and global trade, the binding force of traditional values ​​and social norms was weakened. This in turn has two main reasons: a) Secularization through the Enlightenment, the opening up of new cultures through trade. b) The rapid population growth and swelling of cities. While norms could be stabilized in rural areas through face-to-face controls, the elimination of this control in the anonymous big cities led to the erosion of traditional norms.
2. The problem of the exploitation of moral inputs.
In the market economy, according to the analysis of the ethics of order, there is the problem that one-sided moral preliminary work can be systematically exploited. Homann and Lütge explain this as follows: "If an actor, an individual or a company, for moral reasons, provides costly preliminary and additional services, it is at a disadvantage compared to less moral competitors and may even have to be eliminated from the market."

Both developments are irreversible. A turnaround would also be undesirable from the point of view of regulatory ethics due to the expected loss of prosperity and freedom.

Order ethics as ethics of advantages and incentives

The ethics of order - as a draft of normative ethics - is systematically designed for the problem of social order in modernity. In this way, it distinguishes itself from classic ethical concepts, which primarily address their demands to the individual. Ideally, individualistic ethical concepts can be formalized as follows:

Thesis IE : Immoral motives or preferences of the actors are to blame for morally questionable conditions.
Demand IE : These conditions should be remedied by making moral demands on the actors and asking them to change their consciousness, to change their motives. The moral control of a society thus takes place through appeals, possibly also through education.

From the point of view of order ethics, classical ethics fails because of the two new problems of modernity mentioned above:

  1. In a pluralistic society - a society with different values ​​and different normative trade-offs - the moral demands are simply not shared by many.
  2. Even when the moral demands are shared, the structure of human interaction can prevent problem-solving. For example, company X, even if it wanted to, cannot raise its environmental standards under conditions of fierce price competition, as it would otherwise be out of competition with a competitor. This still applies even if all companies were interested in such a regulation. The companies are thus in a prisoner's dilemma .

The traditional ethics, which mainly functions through appeals and relies on a change of consciousness, fails from the point of view of order ethics because of the problem structure of modern society. In order to solve the two normative problems of modernity, according to the ethics of order, there must above all be a shift in focus from the individual level to the rule level. Parallel to the individual ethics, the thesis and requirement of the ethics of order can be formalized ideally as follows:

Thesis OE : Morally questionable conditions are not due to immoral preferences or goals, but to certain structures of interaction.
Demand OE : Therefore, moral demands - at least when their practical implementation is sought - must be aimed at meeting the conditions that apply to all actors, i. H. Change rules. [...] The moral control of a society thus takes place by changing the incentive structures .

The central normative criterion of the ethics of order is the improvement of everyone or the Pareto criterion. The ethics of order seeks solution strategies for social problems at the rule change level that are capable of consensus. The consensus criterion systematically takes into account the deep pluralism of modern societies - and thus the first problem.

Individual ethics within the ethics of order

In order to solve normative problems, regulatory ethics relies on rule changes and thus often also on changes to the law. However, this should not obscure the view that regulatory ethics “is fundamentally not about rules or institutions, but about advantages and incentives”. Rather, rules are only the systematic place to set incentives. Rules can not only be set by the state, but can also develop informally or be introduced informally. For example, trust norms, reputation standards and social capital can form in groups through invisible manual processes. Norms like those of the “honorable businessman” can also be reconstructed in this way. To stabilize these norms, however, morality is needed, on the one hand to absorb the uncertainty that informal rules bring with them and on the other hand to punish rule violations informally, for example through warnings or censure. Individual ethics must therefore always be taken into account when face-to-face control is possible again, such as within companies and associations. In this context, however, it is essential that the individual ethics is fundamentally compatible with incentives in the contexts described. In trust networks and communities with high social capital, the individual individuals benefit from the existence of these rules. To model informal rules, order ethics uses both the theory of incomplete contracts and the scheme of iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

Methodology of the ethics of order

Since the ethics of order, in contrast to classical individualistic ethics, focuses on the question of implementability and stability, it necessarily makes more use of social science and, above all, economic methods. The central component of the theory of order ethics is the Homo Oeconomicus model. Attention is always drawn to the fact that the Homo Oeconomicus model is a “useful fiction” and not an image of man. The Homo Oeconomicus is understood by the ethics of order as a theoretical construct that can explain the interaction results or patterns "which are to be expected systematically in dilemma structures." Another essential component of the ethics of order is the prisoner's dilemma of game theory. The prisoner's dilemma is at the center of the ethics of order because it can model the second problem, the problem of the exploitation of moral preliminary work in the market economy. Karl Homann and Andreas Suchanek explain the status of the prisoner's dilemma as follows: “[Dilemma structures] are a general“ scheme ”that is intended to steer search and research activities in a certain direction. The dilemma structures are used as heuristics . "

Criticism of the ethics of order

Criticism of the ethics of order comes from classical liberalism as well as from economic ethical conceptions that are in the tradition of discourse theory .

literature

  • Conill Sancho, Jesús; Luetge, Christoph; Schönwälder-Kuntze, Tatjana (eds.) (2008): Corporate citizenship, contractarianism and ethical theory. On philosophical foundations of business ethics. Farnham, England, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co.
  • Gaus, Gerald F. (2012): The order of public reason. A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. 1st edition Cambridge [u. a.]: Cambridge University Press.
  • Homann, Karl (2002): Advantages and Incentives. On the foundation of an ethic of the future. ed. v. Christoph Lütge. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
  • Homann, Karl; Lütge, Christoph (2013): Introduction to Business Ethics. 3rd edition Münster: LIT-Verl.
  • Homann, Karl; Suchanek, Andreas (2005): Economics. An introduction. 2nd edition Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
  • Küppers, Arnd: The order ethics of the Catholic social doctrine (Church and Society Green Series, issue no. 436, published by the Catholic Social Science Center) . JP Bachem Medien, Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-7616-3139-3 .
  • Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
  • Lütge, Christoph (2005): Economic Ethics, Business Ethics and the Idea of ​​Mutual Advantages, in: Business Ethics: A European Review 14, No. 2, pp. 108-118. (PDF; 123 kB)
  • Lütge, Christoph (2008): Moral added values ​​and social stability, in: Archive for Legal and Social Philosophy 94, Issue 3, pp. 384-402. (PDF; 133 kB)
  • Lütge, Christoph (2012): Fundamentals of Order Ethics: Law, Business Ethics and the Financial Crisis, in: Archive for Legal and Social Philosophy Supplements 130, pp. 11-21 (PDF; 5.0 MB)
  • Lütge, Christoph (2012): Business ethics without illusions. Order theoretical reflections. 1st edition Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
  • Lütge, Christoph (ed.) (2013): Handbook of the philosophical foundations of business ethics. Berlin: Springer, 3 Vols.
  • Lütge, Christoph (2015): Order Ethics or Moral Surplus: What Holds a Society Together? Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
  • Lütge, Christoph (2016): Order Ethics and the Problem of Social Glue, in: University of St. Thomas Law Journal 12 (2), pp. 339–359.
  • Lütge, Christoph; Armbrüster, Thomas; Müller, Julian (2016): Order Ethics: Bridging the Gap between Contractarianism and Business Ethics, in: Journal of Business Ethics 136 (4), pp. 687-697.
  • Lütge, Christoph; Mukerji, Nikil (eds.) (2016): Order Ethics. An ethical framework for the Social Market Economy. Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Mantzavinos, Chrysostomos (2001): Individuals, institutions, and markets. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Lütge: Economic Ethics, Business Ethics and the Idea of ​​Mutual Advantages, in: Business Ethics: A European Review 14 (2005), No. 2, p. 111.
  2. ↑ Homann, Karl; Lütge, Christoph (2005): Introduction to Business Ethics. 2nd edition Münster: LIT-Verl., P. 17.
  3. ↑ Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 43
  4. ↑ Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 43
  5. ^ Gaus, Gerald F. (2012): The order of public reason. A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. 1st edition Cambridge [u. a.]: Cambridge University Press.
  6. ↑ Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 44.
  7. ↑ Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 47.
  8. ↑ Mantzavinos, Chrysostomos (2001): Individuals, institutions, and markets. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106ff.
  9. ↑ Lütge, Christoph (2007): What holds a society together? Ethics in the age of globalization. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 49.
  10. ↑ Homann, Karl; Lütge, Christoph (2005): Introduction to Business Ethics. 2nd edition Münster: LIT-Verl., P. 65.
  11. ↑ Homann, Karl; Lütge, Christoph (2005): Introduction to Business Ethics. 2nd edition Münster: LIT-Verl., P. 66.
  12. ↑ Homann, Karl; Suchanek, Andreas (2005): Economics. An introduction. 2nd edition Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 382.