One of the signs that a field of work is maturing is that researchers begin to explore its roots. This book is the most recent of at least three in the last decade that offer serious scholarship on the history of business ethics and corporate responsibility.^{Footnote 1} Gabriel Abend offers readers a thoughtful, thorough, and original treatise on business ethics through the lenses of sociology and history—but his disciplinary skills encompass philosophy, theology, and management science.

Readers will welcome thoughtfulness:

• • in the use of footnotes instead of endnotes, giving ready access not only to citations and references, but also to substantive observations that supplement the material in the text;

• • in helpful chapter introductions, subsection headings, and regular transitions and closings;

• • in the author’s writing style that is readable, imaginative, and often witty.

Readers will also welcome the author’s thoroughness in mobilizing sociological scholarship with a broad disciplinary awareness of philosophy, history, political science, law, business, and (Protestant) theology. Perhaps because of this robust portfolio of disciplinary content, however, the absence of any reference to Catholic social teaching (1891-2010) is unfortunate. Papal encyclicals about social justice, private property, solidarity with the poor, human dignity and subsidiarity, consumerism and the common good, (to name only a few of the core principles of that tradition) would have added considerable richness to the narrative. Indeed, since Abend’s two paradigmatic “moral backgrounds,” Standards of Practice and Christian Merchant, are contrasted later in the book, it would be helpful to look to the Catholic tradition on the compatibility of reason and faith (see pp. 142-43).

As for the book’s originality, it manifests itself in new concepts like “the moral background” and “public normativity,” but also in creative treatments of established themes like “the business case for ethics,” and “stewardship.” Also original is the book’s main thesis, to which I now turn.

In the words of the author, “[t]his is a book about business ethicists, their practical work, and the cultural and institutional contexts in which they carry it out. More precisely, it is a book about the history of this work” (p. 9). While the historical scope is “roughly from the 1850s until the 1930s” in the United States, the author’s peripheral vision extends backward to the seventeenth century and forward to the twenty-first. On a more general level, Abend sees himself as developing “a framework for the scientific study of morality.”

The author distinguishes three levels of inquiry, the first two of which – the normative and the behavioral – constitute “first-order morality” while the third – the moral background – is the set of second-order commitments that facilitate, support, or enable first-order moral inquiry. Philosophers will be tempted to interpret “the moral background” as “metaethics,” contrasting it with normative ethics and descriptive ethics, but this would be a mistake. In the first chapter Abend distinguishes six distinct “para-moral” elements of the “social object” that he calls the moral background. These elements include some metaethical features but comprise more (Table 1.1, p. 32):

1. 1. Grounding (What counts as support for first-order normative judgments and beliefs?)

2. 2. Conceptual repertoire (What is the moral vocabulary employed in first-order normative judgments?)

3. 3. Object of evaluation (What entities deserve moral consideration and is the focus on action or character?)

4. 4. Method and argument (Are first-order normative judgments arrived at through analogy, deduction, or other means?)

5. 5. Metaethical objectivity (Are first-order normative judgments relative or true?)

6. 6. Metaphysics (What ontological assumptions go in to first-order normative judgments?)

Abend’s main thesis regarding the history of business ethics is that an important part of it “is invisible” at the level of first-order morality. Says the author: “What is most remarkable about this history is that so much normative continuity and consensus is underlain by divergent moral background elements.” (p. 21, emphasis added).

Another (more colorful) way to characterize the main thesis is that as we survey the “prescriptions, duties, norms, and complaints” of business ethicists over time, “[t]he first order level is relatively uneventful. It is monotonous and predictable…” On the other hand, “The moral background level is much more interesting and rife with significant differences. Without [this book’s] conceptual framework, we would be blind to them. We would miss where the action is” (p. 30, emphasis added). Again: “If you look at the history of slavery or abortion, what is most salient is variation at the first-order level. By contrast, if you look at the history of business ethics, much of the action occurs at the background level” (p. 18, emphasis added).

Most of the book is devoted to exploring the history of the two paradigmatic “moral backgrounds” in business ethics: the secular Standards of Practice type (in chapters two, four, five, and six) and the religious Christian Merchant type (in chapters three, six, and seven). Table 6.1 in chapter six offers an analytical comparison of the two types in a matrix whose rows are the background dimensions or elements developed earlier in the narrative.

In the concluding chapter, Abend reflects on the value of using the notion of the moral background for the scientific investigation of morality more generally. He discusses specifically its relevance to present-day moral psychology and to neuroscience, concluding plausibly that both disciplines would do well to “think harder” about their understanding of morality.

Both the richness of Abend’s analysis and its value for future research in business ethics – indeed in applied ethics generally – are praiseworthy. Nevertheless, there are at least two lines of questioning that the critical reader will wish to raise about the narrative. One line of questioning presents a challenge and the other presents an opportunity.

First, is it empirically true, as Abend claims, that the first-order deliverances of business ethics are essentially undifferentiated and uniform? He writes that

It seems surprising to characterize business ethics as “remarkably stable” in contrast to other first-order areas of applied ethics (such as medicine, law, and public policy). In fact, and on the contrary, the normative claims of business ethicists appear to display significant disagreement. Both sides of many contentious, first-order issues have been argued energetically, such as whether corporate “inversions” for tax avoidance are appropriate, whether there is a corporate responsibility to implement fair labor standards in developing countries, whether (and how) marketing to vulnerable populations can be done ethically, whether embryonic stem cell research for commercial purposes is wrong, and whether corporations have a right to free speech and religious liberty. And this is just an illustrative selection. In another example, Abend clearly thinks that slavery and women’s rights are first-order issues that involved “normative variation” at different points in history (p. 18); but these issues seem to intersect with business ethics. Despite Abend’s persuasive arguments about differentiation at the second-order level, it is not clear that differentiation at the first-order level in business ethics is less than the first-order variation in other areas of applied ethics. Indeed, might we not expect such first-order differentiation precisely because of the notable second-order differences laid out with such historical sophistication in the book? It would be more than surprising if moral backgrounds as dissimilar as the Standards of Practice type and the Christian Merchant type did not yield at least some significant first-order normative dissimilarities. The tendency toward moral relativism of the Standards of Practice type should alone lead us to expect first-order variance.

A second line of questions centers on the empirical study of moral backgrounds. Abend describes his project as emphatically “a tool for empirical research,” presumably in keeping with its disciplinary homes in sociology and history:

Nevertheless, Abend seems to leave open the possibility that people might “adopt” background beliefs or “subscribe” to background understandings (p. 69). This is important for philosophical and theological readers because it means that individuals or groups can (in principle) choose among moral backgrounds, even convert from one to another. It means, in other words, that the realm of moral backgrounds is not only open to empirical study, but to normative assessment.^{Footnote 2}

To summarize, the first line of questioning challenges the characterization of first order normative and behavioral content of business ethics as undifferentiated or homogeneous, while the second line of questioning asks whether the moral backgrounds that support first order business ethics admit of normative argument, i.e., can be evaluated as to their coherence or adequacy. To be sure, if one’s view of first-order business ethics is that it lacks disagreement, one’s motivation to adjudicate among diverse moral backgrounds is dampened. But if diverse moral backgrounds yield significantly different normative and behavioral foregrounds, the “science of morality” might well need to be supplemented by second-order normative inquiry.

The Moral Background is a formidable but thoroughly engaging book. It is rich in historical detail about business ethics practitioners and innovative in its conceptualization of “moral backgrounds.” This work will stimulate healthy dialogue in business ethics between social science and philosophy.