Organisational indulgences or abuse of indulgences: Can good actions somehow wipe out corporate sins?

Abstract

Assessment of the overall moral stature of organisations is notoriously difficult. This is partly of course because they are collective entities but also because they rarely present a clear-cut picture in respect of moral stance: we will typically find that while organisations engage in wrong-doing, they also engage in “right-doing”, often with a view to compensating in some typically unspecified way for their wrongdoing. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to bring a new perspective to understanding this somewhat paradoxical organisational behaviour. We suggest that by drawing in an analogical manner on the ancient Catholic conception of proper indulgences and abuses of indulgence, we can develop a fruitful way to understand compensatory right doing activity as well as a powerful normative tool for morally assessing such activity. This locates the paper firmly within the field of business ethics but it also yields some interesting insights regarding the motivations of certain organisational behaviours. We finally suggest that we can conceptualise an organisation’s activity in this respect along a kind of moral spectrum that stretches from pure organisational impostorism1 through abuse of indulgence to proper indulgence and we suggest some illustrations of these from well-known business cases.