Damaged Goods—Or Durable? A Response to Tom McInerney

Contrary to criticisms by Thomas McInerney, Durable Goods proposes a realistic and empirically testable “covenantal” ethic for moving management and labor beyond tactics of mutual coercion and evasion. Nonetheless, two questions asked by McInerney remain germane. First, should the moral claims of management and labor always receive equal moral consideration, as a matter of justice? To this substantive question Durable Goods admittedly provides a less than satisfactory answer. Second, can the normative theory proposed by Durable Goods, based in part as it is on the Bible, meet the standards of cogency, coherence, and parsimony appropriate to business ethics as a field of rigorous inquiry? This methodological question remains unaddressed.