AbstractSpirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people’s lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in (...) Buddhist philosophy—skillful means and the middle way—to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency—the ‘re-centering’ of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior—and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning. (shrink)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctioned investor-paid rating agency Egan-Jones for falsely stating that it did not know its clients’ investment positions. The SEC’s action against Egan-Jones raises the broad question whether knowledge of clients’ investment positions creates a conflict of interest for investor-paid ratings. In an experimental setting, we find that investor-paid rating agencies are likely to assign credit ratings that are biased in favor of their clients’ positions, and that this effect is attenuated when the rated company (...) has a sophisticated investor base that is expected to scrutinize ratings. The effect is not conditional on the risk profile of the rated companies. Taken together, our findings suggest that a conflict of interest stemming from investors’ preferences is likely to bias ratings under investor-pays business models, but scrutiny by the company’s investor base can counteract this bias. (shrink)

By synthesizing the argumentation theory of new rhetoric with research on heuristics and motivated reasoning, we develop a conceptual view of argumentation based on reasoning motivations that sheds new light on the morality of decision-making. Accordingly, we propose that reasoning in eristic argumentation is motivated by psychological (e.g., anxiety reduction) or material (e.g., vested interests) gains that do not depend on resolving the problem in question truthfully. Contrary to heuristic argumentation, in which disputants genuinely argue to reach a practically rational (...) solution, eristic argumentation aims to defeat the counterparty rather than seeking a reasonable solution. Eristic argumentation is susceptible to arbitrariness and power abuses; therefore, it is inappropriate for making moral judgments with the exception of judgments concerning moral taboos, which are closed to argumentation by their nature. Eristic argumentation is also problematic for strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making because it impedes the search for the right heuristic under uncertainty as an ecologically rational choice. However, our theoretical view emphasizes that under extreme uncertainty, where heuristic solutions are as fallible as any guesses, pretense reasoning by eristic argumentation may be instrumental for its adaptive benefits. Expanding the concept of eristic argumentation based on reasoning motivations opens a new path for studying the psychology of reasoning in connection to morality and decision-making under uncertainty. We discuss the implications of our theoretical view to relevant research streams, including ethical, strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making. (shrink)