Globalization, with its undisputed benefits, also presents complex moral challenges that business leaders cannot ignore. Some of this moral complexity is attributable to the scope and nature of specific issues like climate change, intellectual property rights, economic inequity, and human rights. More difficult aspects of moral complexity are the structure and dynamics of human moral judgment and the amplified universe of global stakeholders with competing value claims and value systems whose interests must be considered and often included in the decision-making (...) process. While managing moral challenges is considered in management literature to be a legitimate and crucial function of business leadership, the complexity of moral challenges in a globalized business culture stretches the managerial capacities of individuals who rely on a personal moral compass and their own wisdom traditions of philosophy or religion for guidance. The Global Moral Compass introduces an expanded epistemic value framework as an aid to understanding and managing moral complexity in a globalized business culture. (shrink)

This special issue is devoted to highlighting thinkers who have been overlooked within business ethics and who have important contributions to make to our field. We make the case that, as scholars of a hybrid discipline that also aims to address important issues of business practice, we need to look continually for new sources of insight and wisdom that can both enrich our discourse and improve our ability to generate ideas that have a positive impact on business practice. In this (...) introductory essay, we discuss our rationale for creating this special issue, summarize the articles contained within, and close with thoughts on its significance for the field going forward. (shrink)

This paper outlines the academic architecture of CityLab as graduate program course initiative and Principles of Responsible Management Education capstone exemplar. When the United Nations launched the Millennium Goals in 2000 to focus global development on humanity rather than GDP, the Global Compact was launched as a collateral effort, challenging business, government, and social sector leaders to transform the global economic system. In 2007, the Six PRME focused on business schools, challenging them to reorient their curricula towards preparing students to (...) lead the world in building “an inclusive and sustainable economy.” CityLab is an example of innovating the learning experience and challenging learners to take leadership roles in efforts to enhance the value of livable cities as the foundation of an inclusive and sustainable global economy for the Urban Century. (shrink)

The AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) has written a position paper on how social medical use challenges medical professionalism. The report offers persuasive ethical and practical guidelines for nonclinical internet use, specifically for social networking.This commentary provides a framework from which to apply these guidelines, but adds that there may be important situations in which physicians are not able to act in accordance. The guidelines call for professional reporting of questionable online portrayals or behaviors, but this commentary (...) argues that this may be not only cumbersome to implement, but may violate aspects of constitutional rights. While online social networking may in many ways be a new application of old challenges, there may be other aspects that require novel approaches to medical professionalism. (shrink)

This author offers of narrative of hope in response to the coronavirus pandemic by viewing it as a wake-up call to lean into the adaptive moral challenge of stewardship for the future of humanity and the planet. Acknowledging the many material and social benefits of a global regime of free market urbanism built on advances in science and technology, this is a point in geohistory, the Anthropocene, when the impact of human activities on the Earth has begun to outcompete natural (...) processes. The coronavirus has illuminated systemic moral failures and new moral challenges of the Anthropocene that call for adaptive response if we are to build a hopeful future for humanity and the planet. Pointing to millennia of human adaptive response to threats and disasters, the author asserts an evolutionary hardiness attributable as much to moral capacities as rational intelligence as a singularly defining trait fueling millennia of human adaptive learning and thrival. The current pandemic is the latest point in humanity’s moral evolution of adaptive response to moments of urgent threat that have tested, expanded, and defined our character and moral capacities as a species. Rather than falter under the moral burden of the coronavirus threat and its consequences, the author views this pivotal point as an opportunity to stretch human moral horizons by taking responsibility for the urgent moral challenges we have created and inventing new ethical frameworks and tools that will lead us to new moral understandings and solutions to the moral challenges we face. (shrink)