February 2018
Intermediate to advanced
722 pages
34h 15m
English
Content preview from The Routledge Companion to Business EthicsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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p.204
Alexander Lorch and Thomas Beschorner
Initially developed by Jürgen Habermas1 and Karl-Otto Apel2, discourse ethics remains one of the most influential critical theories of the twentieth century. Habermas’ book The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his later Remarks on Discourse Ethics (1991/1992, 1993)3 describe how his ethical theory does not instruct people “upon what they decide but how they come to these decisions” (our emphasis, Baert 2001: 85) in fair conditions of discourse. This differentiation between “what” and “how” points to two important streams in normative ethics: material ethics on the one hand and formal or process-oriented ethics on the other hand. Material ethics ...