Understanding the Separation Thesis

Business Ethics Quarterly 18 (2):213-232 (2008)
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Abstract

Many writers in the field of business ethics seem to have accepted R. Edward Freeman’s argument to the effect that what he calls “the separation thesis,” or the idea that business and morality can be separated in certain ways, should be rejected. In this paper, I discuss how this argument should be understood more exactly, and what position “the separation thesis” refers to. I suggest that there are actually many interpretations (or versions) of the separation thesis going around, ranging from semantic, empirical and reformative to some which are straightforwardly normative. While it is generally agreed that the separation thesis should be rejected, then, there is not as much agreement on what this thesis actually says. I suggest that whether or not we should<br>reject the separation thesis, however, ultimately must depend on how we understand it more exactly—on certain interpretations, the thesis comes out as more or less trivially false, but we should demand more evidence or argument to reject it on certain other interpretations. This result presents a challenge for all those writers who are committed to the rejection of the separation thesis.

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Joakim Sandberg
University of Gothenburg

References found in this work

The Politics of Stakeholder Theory.R. Edward Freeman - 1994 - Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (4):409-421.
Business Ethics.Richard T. De George - 1983 - Journal of Business Ethics 2 (1):71-72.
Morality and strategy in stakeholder identification.John Kaler - 2002 - Journal of Business Ethics 39 (1-2):91 - 99.
Overcoming the Separation Thesis.Andrew C. Wicks - 1996 - Business and Society 35 (1):89-118.

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