Stakeholder Theory and Imperfect Duties

O’Neill (1996), in her work, begins with the distinction between universalist and particularist approaches to ethical theory. The universalist approach is one that focuses on certain universal principles that serve as guides to ethical behavior most perspicuously advanced by Kantian deontologists and utilitarians. The general universalist approach, as is well known, came under criticism from virtue ethicists who hold that moral or virtuous action must be grasped in terms of culturally and socially specific descriptions. O’Neill points out that what is at issue is the abstract character of act descriptions that universalists identify as the proper content of universal principles, and the virtue ethicist’s insistence that we cannot guide or judge action by using abstract descriptions or principles that incorporate them. Action, they say, must be grasped in terms of culturally and socially specific descriptions and thereby intelligible and accessible to particular audiences. Robert Solomon (1993; see also Mintz 1996; Hartman 1998) has probably been the most ambitious in taking efforts to apply virtue ethics to business practice.