Manuel Velasquez is Department Chair, Charles J. Dirksen Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, USA. Velasquez is known as one of the fathers of academic business ethics and teaches courses in business ethics, business and public policy, and business strategy. He is the author of Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases, one of the world’s most widely used business ethics textbooks.
Joan Elise Dubinsky is a Senior Lecturer, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland; and a Fellow with the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. She has served as the Chief Ethics Officer for both the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.
Gretchen Winter and Patricia H. Werhane also provided questions for this interview. Gretchen Winter (gwinter@illinois.edu, linkedin.com/in/gretchen-winter-47a81311/) is Clinical Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Gies College of Business and the Grainger College of Engineering City Scholars Program and adjunct professor in the College of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign; she also is an invited professor at CY Cergy Paris School of Law.
Patricia H. Werhane (pwerhane@gmail.com) is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia.
A note on this series: In the last 40 years or so, an entirely new academic and occupational niche for practicing ethics in business has emerged. Many of the original academic business ethicists came to the field through philosophy and brought their thinking and research into business schools. Many of the original practitioners came to the field through the law and remain close to the practice of law.
In an effort to preserve and share this knowledge and practical experience, the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business has filmed and transcribed the oral histories of these pioneers and early adopters. To date, almost 50 academics and practitioners have been interviewed, each with 25 years or more of experience in the field of business ethics. This series aims to provide a better understanding of how the business ethics field and profession have evolved over the decades through the interviewees’ own experiences. This interview was condensed for clarity and brevity.
JED: How did you get started teaching business ethics?
MV: I got my PhD in ethics from the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley. After three years of teaching at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, I became a faculty member in the philosophy department at Santa Clara University in 1977. I was tenured in the philosophy department and then offered a chair in the business school. I accepted the Dirksen Chair of Business Ethics in 1983 have been teaching in the business school ever since.
A couple of years after starting at Santa Clara, I was asked to develop a course in business ethics for the business school. I thought I would be able to develop a course in business ethics over the summer and be ready to teach in the fall. As I started reading in the field, I realized that was a crazy idea since, to do a good job, I would have to know a lot more about business than I knew then. So, I went back to the classroom, got the equivalent of an MBA at my own institution, and then two years later, I finally started teaching business ethics. After moving to the business school in 1980, I branched out and began to teach business and public policy since there’s a large overlap between the two areas. A few years later, I realized that public policy was actually a part of business strategy. So, I eventually became competent in teaching strategy, public policy, and business ethics. However, as the field of business ethics kept growing, I eventually had to give up teaching strategy and public policy. Now, all I teach is business ethics. I’m a one-trick pony again.
My story of going from philosophy to teaching business ethics full-time is not that unusual for people in my field. Santa Clara University was then (and is now) a Jesuit school, so it has for many decades had a strong commitment to justice and ethics. There has always been a campuswide sense that every student should take courses in ethics and that business students, in particular, should take courses in business ethics. In fact, generally, all Jesuit and Catholic institutions have become congenial places for business ethicists like me. And, if you’re going to teach business ethics, you need to know a bit about business, so most business ethicists today have acquired some training in business as well as in ethics.
JED: What resources did you create as you developed your expertise in business ethics?
MV: When I began teaching business ethics, there were no textbooks. So, I began to write notes for my students, and eventually, I developed these notes into a textbook on business ethics. Prentice Hall eventually published it in 1980; it was one of the first single-author textbooks on business ethics. (It wasn’t the first business ethics textbook, though: The year before, Tom Donaldson and Patricia Werhane’s collections of readings had been put together in a textbook.)
It just so happened that Gerry Cavanagh—who was then teaching business ethics at the University of Detroit—visited Santa Clara when I was working on my textbook. He offered to read my manuscript, so I gave it to him. A few weeks later, he came back to me, shaking his head and saying, “This will never do, this will never do, Manny. It’s all theory; it’s too much abstract philosophy! It needs to have some real examples and cases. And it needs to be more practical.” So, at his urging, I rewrote the whole manuscript. Gerry not only gave me the idea to incorporate cases and business examples into the textbook but more importantly, he got me to operationalize the abstract theories of ethics that we philosophers love and to turn them into more understandable decision-making guides that non-philosophers would be able to use in their daily lives as managers. This textbook was unlike most published during that early period because it combined practical business ethics concepts with business ethics cases. I think that my textbook was the first full, one-author textbook in the field back then. And I’m still doing revisions on that textbook.
JED: How have you contributed to this evolving field of business ethics?
MV: As I worked on my first textbook, I began to develop a framework for thinking through ethical issues in business. At that time, no one was quite sure how to bring together moral philosophy and the real issues that businesspeople had to deal with. How could we bring these very abstract concepts to bear on the problems that businesspeople have in their day-to-day work? I developed a very simple framework for thinking through an issue in business ethics. The framework was built around three questions: Are you respecting the rights of the people who are impacted or engaged with this issue? Does your plan of action reflect fairness and justice? Will what you are doing contribute to the overall welfare of a group or society as a whole?
Any philosopher will tell you that these three questions reflect three different streams of business ethics research. Questions about rights reflect the work of Immanuel Kant and John Locke. Questions about fairness and justice developed from the work that began with Aristotle and continues through John Rawls. The last question about the overall welfare of people is grounded in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill on utilitarianism.
JED: Where is your research taking you today?
MV: Another issue that continues to intrigue me is this: What is the nature of a corporation? Not what is its purpose, but what is it. And the problem on which I focused was whether a corporation was the kind of entity that can be morally responsible for what it does. My view is that groups—like corporations and organizations—cannot be morally responsible for what they do. Only human beings are morally responsible for their actions, and human beings are morally responsible for what their corporations do.
Corporations are not the same kind of creatures that human beings are. First, unlike human beings, they consist of creatures who each have their own free will and who can each decide on their own whether to go along with what the other members of the group or corporation are doing (this is a key difference). Moreover, their psychology, if you will, also differs in key ways. They don’t think. They don’t make sense. They don’t feel sorry. They don’t have emotions. In short, they don’t have the equipment a creature needs to be morally responsible for what they do. And so, if anybody is to blame for what corporations do, it can’t be the corporations themselves. Who, then, is responsible for what corporations do? Well, I think it’s fairly clear that responsibility for corporate acts has to lie with people inside the corporation who are in control of the actions of the corporation and not the corporation itself. Typically, this would be the top managers of the corporation, although in some cases, other individuals in the corporation may be in control of what the corporation does, and so they should be held responsible for corporate acts.
My current work has taken me in a somewhat different direction. I am currently working on more empirical issues, like how religion influences the actions corporations take to promote social responsibility. This includes questions like: How does religion affect how corporations treat their employees? How does religion impact diversity, the environment, and climate change? The empirical research that I have done in this area has focused on mainstream Protestants, Catholics, and Evangelicals because these three are the largest religious groups in the United States. What we are finding is that religion—especially Catholicism—can have a positive influence on companies in each area (employees, the environment, etc.). Mainstream or mainline Protestantism also has a fairly good record in each of those areas. But Evangelicals either have failed to make any positive influence in these areas or, surprisingly, have had a negative influence—especially on the environment. Why is it that a religious group would have a negative influence on what companies do, given that religious groups are generally dedicated to doing good? Well, corporations are under financial pressure to do things that harm the environment, such as polluting or taking shortcuts in the manufacturing of their products. When those negative influences are allowed to operate on companies without the counterbalancing positive moral influence a religion can have, you end up with companies that do bad things to the environment. And that, I think, is why companies that are located in regions that are predominantly influenced by Evangelical churches tend to be companies that have poor environmental records. What kind of methodologies did we use in our studies? Basically, we measured the level of religiosity in each county in the United States.
We had data on the percentage of a county’s population affiliated with the three dominant religious groups. And then, we looked at whether there was a correlation between these religious populations and what the companies with headquarters in those regions were doing in these various areas of corporate social responsibility. We found there was a definite correlation. For example, the correlation between high levels of Evangelical religiosity in a county and companies in that region with poor environmental records was fairly substantial. On the other hand, there is also a significant correlation between high levels of Protestant or Catholic religiosity in a region and companies with good environmental records. So, religion, it seems, can have a good or a bad influence on companies, depending on the religion.
JED: What are your observations about the future of business ethics?
MV: I’m pessimistic. We’ve passed the point where we can do much to avert significant climate change. Some very tough times lie ahead of us—not just as individuals but also for organizations and corporations. The big questions for the future are not going to be about what we should do to change the climate. It’s going to be too late to do much about that. We need to start thinking about how companies and organizations can start adjusting to the catastrophes that lie ahead of us. How do you protect what’s left of the environment? How do you protect your employees as disaster after disaster keeps overtaking us, as our forests continue to burn up, as water resources become increasingly scarce, as food production declines?
So, what can we ethicists do? Businesses will try to protect themselves and continue doing what they’re doing. Business ethicists will have to remind businesses that there are other more important issues they had better start thinking about. It’s the role of ethicists to be the prophets in this new world we are entering.
JED: What has been the impact of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University?
MV: I was the founder and director of the center for the first five years of its life. I returned as its director for a temporary period later in the life of the center.
The Markkula Center has had quite an impact. The Markkula Center offers research, programs and activities in political ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, and legal ethics, to name a few areas on which it has focused. It offers various student programs. It assists faculty in incorporating ethics into their courses. The center has many outreach activities to hospitals and companies in the region. It offers a robust website with a considerable following and an online presence. It offers material on ethics for instructors, businesspeople, medical professionals, and so on. The center has used the ethical framework I crafted early in my career: the framework that blends the three major analytical trends in moral philosophy of rights, justice, and utilitarian theory. I’m pretty proud that, through the work of the center, this framework has continued to help people think through the tough ethics dilemmas they encounter in their work.
