Ethical theory does not have a consolidated place in business decision making. For example, the difficulty encountered by authors of articles dealing with "business ethics", usually is how to insert ethical theory to solve or clarify problems of an ethical or social nature. So much is the problem that some teachers have withdrawn ethical theory from within courses dealing with moral problems, judging it as not important. They say that we are "teaching ethics without ethics to teach".
Even with these problems, the "place" of utilitarian and formalist ethics remains firm. The main focus of this article is to define the role of ethical theory in business and society. And also, to draw attention to a phenomenon that is taking place in business, a popular intuition that says there is something '' artful '' about doing a good management. The article also says that the role of ethics is much greater than just that.
The way that ethics makes the inquiry of their knowledge is the same as sociology, chemistry or meteorology, all these disciplines have some kind of epistemological procedure that guarantees the veracity of an acquired knowledge, such as: statistical, laboratory, or experimental techniques. Ethical theory also has a similar mode, but its results are not very agreeable, then, some ethical theorists do not agree with it.
Gilbert Ryle said there are 2 ways to know. The distinction, in a simple way, would be the difference between ‘’know that'’ and ‘’know how’’, managers should normally ‘’know that’’ interest rates influence business growth, employees are more productive when objectives are clear and realistic, and '' know how '' to inspire subordinates, make exceptions to a rule, write concise reports. Both forms can be differentiated in several ways, but an important part is the susceptibility with verbal articulations. There is a problem between ‘'knowing how'’ and this articulation.
The article continues to explore what is known as ''know how '' to manage, focusing on the ethics of managing and showing how ‘’management ethics’’ is better understood as ‘’management aesthetics’’. According to Hartshone, ethics is fundamentally aesthetic, and the categories of right and wrong ultimately are reduced to the beautiful and ugly. The analytic tradition of regarding ethics as primarily a matter of verbal justification rather than personal execution tends to hide important ethical and aesthetic issues behind words like ‘’personality’’ and ‘’style’’.
As an art, the article said that a successful management consists of the two forms of knowing - ''knowing that’’, and ‘’knowing how’’, and that managing is a kind of balancing of opposing interests, such as: Rationality - Spirituality, Control - Autonomy, Standardization - Diversity, etc. In the book "In Search of Excellence," Peters and Waterman talk about properties with "loose" and "tight" properties, which they identify as virtues of excellent companies.
So one can conclude that good management is significantly aesthetic, along with a balance between ‘'knowing how'’ and ‘'knowing to'’. But good managing is also ethical managing; and these same complementary forms of knowing can be used to generate suggestions toward a more positive and useful view of ethical theory as it relates to management.