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Chapter 2

Authenticity and Freedom

How could it be an exercise of true freedom to refuse to be open to the very reality which enables our self-realization?

—John Paul II, Fides et Ratio

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

JAMES IS A branch manager for the Manhattan division of an international commercial bank. His boss tells him that the Manhattan offices are slated to close in a couple of months, soon after the first of the year, and the branch's functions will henceforth be handled in India, where labor costs are considerably cheaper. The executive asks James to keep the news to himself, since regulatory documents will need to be filed first. James promises to keep quiet. A few days later, James's colleague and trusted friend of many years asks him if a rumor floating around the office that the branch is shutting down is true. When James casts his eyes askance, the colleague gets irritated and says, “Hey c'mon, this is serious stuff. In this economic downturn there aren't a lot of jobs out there. Should I be cutting back on the holidays this year and sending out my resume? Just let me know what's up, OK?” What should James do? As a corporate manager, James is bound to uphold confidentiality, and in fact he vowed to do so. However, he's one of only a privileged few who knows about the firm's future plans, and the employee questioning him is his trusted friend.¹

According to the Aristotelian view presented in the previous chapter, practicing virtue—that is, finding the right blend of reasons and motives (including emotions) in the face of practical problems or moral dilemmas, such as the one facing James, the fictitious branch manager in the scenario sketched above—produces or leads to the greater perfection (or at least definition) of moral character, as if one's character is somehow a fixed attribute or objective feature of oneself.² On such a view, for instance, if James decides to help his friend by informing him of the plans for downsizing, such a choice is prompted by the nature of James's underlying character, which reveals the virtues of compassion and loyalty to friends. However, deciding to honor the obligation of confidentiality would be the result of a more dominant component of James's character winning out, a character revealed in the exercise of the virtues of promise keeping and loyalty to the firm. It is against this conventional conception of virtue ethics, which treats a person's character as a collection of objective facts about her, that we should view Sartre's view of human freedom, for Sartre provides a radically different perspective on the nature of character.

To anticipate Sartre's conclusion, the deployment of neither reason nor motives (including emotions) in the pursuit of moral virtue provides an ultimate ground for human action. Reason and motives are placed relative to something much more basic: the agent's freedom. According to a Sartrean point of view,³ a businessperson like James confronting a moral choice, like the one set out above, is free to choose, and by making a free choice, he is creating his existence, much like a writer inventing the characters and plot of a novel. Values such as happiness, the good life, success, getting along with others, and economic security tend to fall by the wayside as justifying ends of action; rather, the authenticity with which we face our freedom seems to be the chief criterion for judging persons and their actions as good or bad. Thus, if moral character—that is, authenticity—has a treasured meaning in Sartre, it is to be found, not in narrow instrumental reason, but in being reflectively conscious of our human condition and standing well in relation to our essential freedom.

For the contemporary businessperson, the main obstacle to realizing an authentic character (as a realized vow and capacity to be reflectively conscious of our human condition) is the attitude of “bad faith” in its myriad forms. The questions to be explored in this chapter, on the basis of this forecast, are: (1) If we abandon the assumption that a person's character is made up of fixed, objective virtues, or “givens,” by reference to what can we judge the actions of businesspeople, such as our hypothetical manager James, who confront hard moral choices in ambiguous or extreme situations? (2) What sense can be made of the notion of authentic character for people working in modern organizations? (3) In what guise does bad faith arise in business decision making and in the structure of the modern corporation? (4) How might a Sartrean approach direct us in fostering authenticity in business ethics education?

This chapter is divided into two main parts. In light of the widespread neglect of Sartre's thought in the business ethics literature, Part 1 provides an exposition of Sartre's point of view, centering on his treatment of human freedom and character.⁴ Part 2 explores the implications of Sartre's perspective for business ethics. Specific attention is paid in the second part as to how a Sartrean vantage point might suggest changes in the way that business ethics is taught, changes in the way businesspeople deal with ethical issues, and changes in business organizations.

Part 1: Sartre's Account of Human Freedom and Character

Sartre begins his treatment of the role of reason and motive in Being and Nothingness by remarking on how they are related to action. To explicate the idea of action, Sartre uses an historical event: Constantine's act of founding Constantinople as a new home for emperors. To see the relevance of such an apparently archaic example for our reflections on contemporary business ethics, just imagine that we are analyzing the proposed action of a CEO reestablishing his multinational firm's corporate headquarters from the United States to the Far East, and we are inquiring into the leader's intentions or underlying motives for the reorganization, which might be complex and ambiguous, ranging from reducing the firm's worldwide tax obligations, to creating a new image, to leveraging the political environment in the new region for competitive advantage. “We should observe first that an action is on principle intentional,”⁵ and Constantine intended to create a countervailing power to Rome.⁶ Further, Sartre develops this example to show that intention is to be understood as “seeing a lack.” As he writes, “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a ‘desideratum’; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatite [negation].”⁷ Constantine acts in view of a desirable state of affairs not yet realized; in view of which, the current state of affairs is seen as lacking. Intentions are not constituted of the “simple consideration of the real state of things.”⁸ The statement that 60 percent of the projected tax revenues have been collected, implies in itself no judgment. But to claim that taxes are badly collected in Rome is to deem the situation as lacking. Seeing Rome's attributes as negatives compared to a desirable possibility provides the ground for Constantine's intention to establish a counterweight to Rome.

Sartre draws two conclusions: (1) No factual state of affairs, whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, a person's psychological “state,” the forces of globalization and economic competition), is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. An act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not.⁹ (2) No factual state of affairs can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a negation or a lack.¹⁰ Action is intentional. Intentionality involves seeing situations as lacking. From these considerations, Sartre establishes two central points. First, consciousness has the power to break with, or distance itself from, its past and its surrounding conditions, and to confer a new meaning on them. Perceiving one's condition as intolerable, Sartre writes, “Implies for consciousness the permanent possibility of effecting a rupture with its own past, of wrenching itself away from its past so as to be able to consider it in the light of a non-being and so as to be able to confer on it the meaning which it has in terms of the project of a meaning which it does not have.”¹¹ The second point is that the actor's freedom is a basic condition of action, and the elements—reasons and motives—of actions can be grasped only by reference to this freedom. Reasons and motives “have meaning only inside a projected ensemble which is precisely an ensemble of non-existents. And this ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it is Me insofar as I have to be myself outside of myself.”¹²

By positing the possibility of a nonexistent ideal state of affairs, the bad state of affairs in Rome provides a good reason for Constantine to make a new capital. (Again, to visualize a counterpart of Sartre's example to a contemporary business scenario, consider, say, a domestic firm's leaders weighing reasons for and against a decision whether to close a U.S. branch and set up outsourcing operations abroad.¹³ Compared with the as yet “non-existent ideal state of affairs,” that is, competitive advantage sought by reducing labor costs through outsourcing, the current “bad state of affairs,” that is, high labor costs and competitive disadvantage, give the company's executives a reason to establish a foreign manufacturing base.) Unless a reason is experienced as such, it is not really a reason.

Likewise, motives can be understood only in relation to an end. The nonexistent ideal state of affairs which I posit gives to a present motive (qua desire) its meaning (object or end), and if it is impossible to find acts without motives or prior reasons, it is because motives and reasons are integral parts of actions. However, the act is not explained by these partial structures alone. Rather, “it is the act which decides its ends and its motives, and the act is the expression of freedom.”¹⁴

It is significant to note that scholars who have employed virtue approaches to analyze business ethics have leaned on a traditional Aristotelian account of motives and reason.¹⁵ Motives, emotions, and attitudes are taken as objective existents that basically determine the executive or manager in what she or he does: Jack Welch created a “lean and mean” culture at General Electric because he is an aggressive, driven person with a realistic orientation. He developed such a character from his childhood upbringing.¹⁶ Such an interpretation of character traits can be found in virtually any business or leadership autobiography, from Donald Trump¹⁷ to Rudolph Giuliani.¹⁸ Reasons refer to the objective factors of a situation, which also have a determining role in what is actually done. So long as we see motives as determining and reasons as pointing to the objective facts, it is difficult to see how Sartre's point of view will provide us with an illuminating answer to the question: Which should have priority, motives or reasons?

On the objective or reasons side first, it is clear that Sartre acknowledges the standard meanings to a certain extent. Historians look to reasons or objective states of affairs to explain acts. Clovis's conversion to Catholicism is explained by reference to the power of the episcopate in Gaul, an objective fact. In this sense, Sartre writes, “the cause is characterized as an objective appreciation of the situation.”¹⁹ All the same, an “objective appreciation can be made only in light of a presupposed end and within the limits of a project of the for-itself toward this end.”²⁰ The power of the episcopate is a reason for conversion for Clovis because he wants to conquer Gaul. Consequently, the meaning of reason is qualified as follows: “We shall therefore use the term cause for the objective apprehension of a determined situation as this situation is revealed in the light of a certain end as being able to serve as the means for attaining this end.”²¹ As compared to traditional meanings, it is not the objectivity of states of affairs that Sartre alters. After all, the Catholic Church of Clovis's time did or did not have power. The key point here is that constituting some state of affairs as a reason for acting depends on the ends we propose for ourselves. Think of a knife as an objective instrument; its instrumental implications depend on what we are about. Even though it is normally used for cutting, if I am hanging up a picture, I can use the knife handle as a hammer.²² A reason, then, as objective evaluation of situations, does not determine an action; rather, it “appears only in and through the project of an action.”²³

We must have projected ourselves “in this or that way in order to discover the instrumental implications of instrumental-things.”²⁴ An exposition of advertising strategies provides a somewhat more complex, yet highly apt example. Whereas we might think of the uses and appeal of automobiles as objective facts—there are sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for those with an interest in trendiness, spaciousness, luxury, and power, and there are small cars for those interested in economy and a competitive edge in tight parking conditions—a common practice in advertising takes advantage of the role of evaluation of given conditions by unique consciousnesses.

Thus, an advertising agency may write different advertising profiles for the same SUV for different audiences. One profile might develop the rugged, off-road capabilities of the vehicle; another, its practical appeal for parents (for example, so-called soccer moms); another, its greater safety and highway dominance relative to smaller cars; and a fourth, its sexiness. By projecting onto the SUV different sets of evaluative interests, the advertising agency has brought out (or created) varying use and appeal implications of the product. Such an advertising agency could well take these words of Sartre as a guiding precept: “The world gives counsel only if one questions it, and one can question it only for a well-determined end.”²⁵ While reasons refer to objective calculations of a state of affairs in the light of given ends, motives refer to the subjective structures that Sartre sees as correlative with reasons. As he writes, “The consciousness which carves out the cause in the ensemble of the world has already its own structure; it has given its own ends to itself, it has projected itself toward its possibles, and it has its own manner of hanging on to its possibilities: this peculiar manner of holding to its possibles is here affectivity.”²⁶

In projecting toward some end, we constitute reasons of some objective state of affairs. Clovis, in Sartre's illustration, sees the power of the church as a reason for conversion. The motive is the consciousness of oneself as moved to some degree, as more or less keen, toward the end in the light of which the reason was constituted. “The motive,” Sartre claims, “is nothing other than the apprehension of the cause insofar as this apprehension is self-consciousness.”²⁷ Clovis's ambition is the subjective correlate of his constituting of the church's power as a reason for conversion; as a certain consumer's sense of adventure or another's intellectual snobbishness, in the advertisers' view, is the correlate of seeing in the projected feature a reason to buy the SUV. But such motives are not preexisting, impelling forces; rather, they are indistinguishable from the projects of which they are partial structures.

The cause, the motive, and the end are the three indissoluble terms of the thrust of a free and living consciousness, which projects itself toward its possibilities and makes itself defined by these possibilities.²⁸

Sartre concludes that the idea of rational choice by cool, detached deliberation about objective factors alone is illusory. “How can I,” he questions, “evaluate causes and motives on which I myself confer their value before all deliberation and by the very choice which I make of myself?”²⁹ Which car profile advertisement I find reasonable depends on the weight my project confers upon “the features profiled.” “When I deliberate,” writes Sartre, “the chips are down.”³⁰ Summarizing the argument to this point: we understand reasons and motives only by locating them in the structure of action; action is necessarily intentional.

While reasons are objective evaluations of states of affairs, the constitution of reasons from states of affairs depends on the interest or projection of self of the evaluator. Motives are the subjective counterparts of reasons constituted by projecting the self in a certain way. But these basic projections are not to be confused with will. “Will” amounts to choosing some action. This could not happen without prior projection of the self-guiding deliberate choice. Our choices, in turn, make the projected self become real. If reasons and motives are constituted in the projection of being toward its possibilities, a number of questions arise about the nature of rational character in Sartre's philosophy. What are these more basic projects? How do we discern them in ourselves? Can we find any sense of reason or the reasonable in these? The particular reasons, motives, and ends of individual actions, and such actions themselves, are all to be seen as part of a more inclusive structure. By contrasting different reactions to a long hike, Sartre delineates what is involved in these basic projects of self. Sartre imagines himself, after hours of hiking, finally giving into his mounting fatigue, throwing down his backpack, and giving up.

Answering a critic's reproach that he could have kept going, that he could have done otherwise, he says that he is too tired. This interchange represents the positions of free-will advocates and determinists. In the spirit of what we have said of reasons and motives above, Sartre challenges the premises about who is right. Acknowledging that he could have done otherwise, the problem should be set forth: “Could I have done otherwise without perceptibly modifying the organic totality of the projects which I am? In other words: I could have done otherwise. Agreed. But at what price?”³¹ It is not the fatigue per se that accounts for the decision to quit. His companions have walked just as far and they are in about the same physical shape. It is not a case of objectively reaching some threshold fatigue level, like watching the hand on a pressure gauge advance to the red shut-off zone. Instead, “I suffer my fatigue. That is, a reflective consciousness is directed upon my fatigue in order to live it and to confer on it a value and a practical relation to myself. It is only on this plane that the fatigue will appear to me as bearable or intolerable. It will never be anything in itself, but it is the reflective For-itself which rising up suffers the fatigue as intolerable.”³² This way of suffering fatigue is not a given. His companions respond differently; that difference throws into relief Sartre's way of regarding the suffering of fatigue as chosen. His companion is not overcome by fatigue; rather, the heat of the sun, the steepness of the slopes, and the effort of his legs are all felt as part of the enjoyable experience of a hike and of conquering the mountain. The “companion's fatigue,” Sartre says, “is lived in a vaster project of a trusting abandon to nature, of a passion consented to in order that it may exist at full strength, and at the same time the project of sweet mastery and appropriation.”³³ But this mode of living his fatigue that the companion exhibits is still unoriginal. It is not sufficient, since behind it rests “a particular relation of my companion to his body, on the one hand, and to things, on the other.”³⁴ The original project of existing one's body in a certain way is a “certain choice which the For-itself makes of itself…”³⁵ In this choice, the body as given—and secondarily, the heat of the sun, our fatigue, and so forth—are “valorized” (given arbitrary value) in a certain way. Sartre depicts his own reaction to physical exhaustion as prompted by a much different way of “existing his body” compared with his companion's; he distrusts his body and doesn't like even having to take it into account. These examples show that the projects that give meaning to reasons and motives are basic choices that reflect who we are and that reveal the various ways we respond to the world. We witness the choices we have made about ourselves in the meanings we ascribe to the world. “The value of things, their instrumental role, their proximity and real distance…do nothing more than to outline my image—that is, my choice. My clothing…whether neglected or cared for, carefully chosen or ordinary, my furniture, the street on which I live, the city in which I reside, the books with which I surround myself, the recreation which I enjoy, everything which is mine…all this informs one of my choice—that is, my being.”³⁶ So we return to Sartre's question of what's involved in opting to press on with the hike rather than stopping. Giving up was not an arbitrary or gratuitous act; it was part of “a certain view of the world in which difficulties can appear ‘not worth the trouble of being tolerated.’”³⁷ To have done otherwise would involve a fundamental alteration of his choice of self. But, asserts Sartre, “this modification is always possible.” The feelings of anguish and responsibility mark our consciousness of our freedom to choose ourselves. We are (painfully) aware of our choices as “unjustifiable,” that is, simply as free assertions of our selves. He writes, “We are perpetually engaged in our choice and perpetually conscious of the fact that we ourselves can abruptly invert this choice and ‘reverse steam.’…By the sole fact that our choice is absolute, it is fragile.”³⁸ Thus, the project, from which emerges a coordinate structure of reasons and motives, is a choice of self at a fundamental level. It is an absolute choice. Taking conditions as “givens” in the face of the contention that freedom is absolute, the question of the status of various “givens” in human experience arises. At first glance, the company where we work, our employment history, our occupation, all of these seem to be irreducible “givens.” Who can say we're free in relation to these objective conditions?

To clarify the question of limits to human freedom, and to show again Sartre's view of how reasons and motives emerge, I will review Sartre's discussion of some of these givens. Sartre's principle is stated clearly at the beginning of his section on “givens”; he writes, “The given…could never be a cause for an action if it were not appreciated. In addition, the appreciation, if it is not to be gratuitous, must be effected in the light of something. And this something which serves to appreciate the given can be only the end. Thus the intention by a single unitary upsurge posits the end, chooses itself, and appreciates the given in terms of the end.”³⁹ This is not to say that givens are chosen to exist. I cannot make the chair over there pop in and out of existence by mere choice. Instead, “by the choice which it makes of its end, freedom causes the datum be revealed in this or that way, in this or that light in connection with the revelation of the world itself.”⁴⁰ Situations are constituted by the relation in which we stand to brute existents. To a hiker standing at the foot of a cliff, the cliff takes on the qualities of climbable/not-climbable. To a passing rubbernecking motorist, the cliff registers as beautiful/ugly. Moreover, whether the cliff will be difficult or easy to scale (its coefficient of adversity) is not simply an objective property. What's hard for one is easy for another. The body itself gets revealed as poorly trained or as well trained by the choice of ventures. So the coefficient of adversity in situations reveals as much about a person as it does about brute givens.

The Project

In a similar way, the past as a determinant of action depends on our freely constituted project in the now. I cannot literally change the past. No physical force in the world is powerful enough to do that. Still, the meaning of the past hinges on my present commitments. In Sartre's words:

By projecting myself towards my ends, I preserve my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning. Who shall decide whether the period which I spent in prison after a theft was fruitful or deplorable? I—according to whether I give up stealing or become hardened. Who can decide the educational value of a trip, the sincerity of a profession of love, the purity of a past intention, etc.? It is I, always I, according to the ends by which I illuminate these past events.⁴¹

The common lament “if I had only” testifies to the relation of present to past. What, at the time, seemed “trivial” or “too difficult to be worth the effort,” becomes illuminated as “what I should have done at all costs.” Likewise, the urgency and weight of past engagements depends on present commitments. The gravity of a manger's professional and organizational commitments, the sanctity of her marriage, duties to her children, obligations to pay debts and carry the mortgage, and the like, may seem like unbreakable chains to the past. But, “suppose,” asks Sartre, “that…I radically modify my fundamental project…my earlier engagements will lose all their urgency.”⁴² Consider “Moonie” religious converts. Bonds to family and old friends dissolve as their indoctrination crystallizes. Thrown out of relation to present commitments, the expected emotions are absent; we are not moved. In such cases, writes Sartre, “the past falls back as a disarmed and duped expectation; it is ‘without force.’”⁴³

What Is Character?

Character and temperament are often depicted in discussions of business as givens about a person. James Cramer, cohost of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer show and cofounder of TheStreet.com portrays his high-octane disposition as if it is a kind of fixture of his being in his bestselling autobiography.⁴⁴ For Sartre, however, a fixity of character only means that the person persists in a certain projection of himself. He argues that “character is a vow. When a man says, ‘I am not easy to please,’ he is entering into a free engagement with his ill-temper, and by the same token his words are a free interpretation of certain ambiguous details in his past. In this sense there is no character; there is only a project of oneself.”⁴⁵ The aim of Sartre's description of various “givens”—past, environment, character, and so forth—is to clarify the human situation, and his conclusions set the stage for an explicit return to the opening question in this chapter, whether reasons or attitude ought to be the priority in business ethics. While we live among various existents, it is we who give meaning and bearing to existents by the manner of our being. The situation—not the things themselves—comes into being only as we transcend the given toward some end. Yet the situation is neither merely subjective nor merely objective. It is neither my impression of the mountain I want to climb, nor the mountain itself. “The situation,” writes Sartre, “Is a relation of being between a for-itself and the in-itself which the for-itself nihilates. The situation is the whole subject (he is nothing but his situation) and it is also the whole ‘thing’ (there is never anything more than things). The situation is the subject illuminating things by his very surpassing, if you like; it is things referring to the subject his own image.”⁴⁶ It is the qualities of the mountain as to-be-climbed, and such hypothetical qualities as difficult, impossible-to-climb, and so on, which reflect the condition of my body. The “silly” choice of this mountain in spite of my condition indicates a certain state of determination to persist.

As the situations exist in the light of my projection of myself, as an individual, Sartre concludes that there is neither any privileged situation nor privileged point of view. To say there is a “privileged situation” is to say that the objective facts demand a certain countenance toward them. Yet, as Sartre argues, “the world gives counsel only if one questions it, and one can question it only for a well-determined end.”⁴⁷ In respect to a projected end, the circumstances will indeed be more or less felicitous, but that is already to evaluate circumstances from some vantage point. Furthermore, the point of view a person assumes is, in the adopting, his own. And each situation, by virtue of the person being a certain way, amongst certain things, is to be thought of as eminently concrete.

Which Should Drive Moral Choice: Reason or Emotion (or Freedom)?

It is time now to summarize this discussion in terms of our question whether intellect or emotion should be business ethics' priority, and which is more likely to promote personal happiness and economic success. Those who argue for the priority of emotions stress the potency of emotions and attitudes in guiding what we do and what we believe. Similarly, those who argue for the priority of reason do so in terms of the importance of having good reasons as the grounds for our actions. Sartre transforms our way of responding to the question with the argument, which I have outlined above, that both reasons and emotions or motives are derivative from something more basic in human action, namely, our free projection of ourselves in our mode of being. If a priority for business ethics is concern for the ultimate ground of action, then, according to Sartre, our primary attention should somehow be with our freedom of choice. Thus, Sartre's view diminishes the status of rational character, if “rational” takes on the restricted sense of evaluating objective conditions as means to given ends. Evaluation may be objective, but it is necessarily done in the light of some end, argues Sartre, and such ends emerge with the free projection of oneself in this or that way. “It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation.”⁴⁸

Authenticity: The Ultimate Ethical Value?

There is, however, a distinguished sense of being rational in Sartre, which is highlighted by a discussion of the status of happiness, security, and success—goals often stressed by those advocating virtue approaches to business ethics.⁴⁹ Bluntly put, happiness, as something like a utilitarian idea of surplus of pleasure over pain, security, and success, even the attainment of Aristotelian well-being or eudaimonia, all carry no special priority for Sartre. As one scholar puts it, “In its more common usage, the term ‘happiness’ finds no place in the authentic life prescribed by Sartre. The best that can be hoped for in terms of reward, end, or goal showing authentic existence is the satisfaction and dignity that arises from the individual's assertion of his freedom in the face of an absurd universe.”⁵⁰ The aim of Sartre's analysis is not to liberate us from suffering, but rather to awaken us to authentic existence. If authenticity is the ultimate ethical value, and being rational means the conscious and deliberate acceptance of our human condition of freedom in our manner of being, then the chief barriers to being rational will be found in those ways of being that undercut such an acceptance. “Bad faith” stands for the ways we run away from acceptance of our freedom; discussing it will clarify what is involved in this sense of being rational.

This passage from Nausea, Sartre's well-known novel, expresses the spirit of bad faith: “For the most trivial event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.”⁵¹ What such stories give us is a pattern to which to conform our lives. We say that the sense and direction of our lives is given in the story, while refusing to recognize that it is we who tell the stories. Insofar as we persist in living our life as a story, we make ourselves thing-like in denying our responsibility for our actions. We say that we are essentially the story we tell, but as Walter Kauffman explains Sartre's view:

A man is not…a waiter, or a coward in the same way in which he is six feet tall or blond…. If I am six feet tall, that is that. It is a fact no less than that the table is, say, two feet high. Being a coward or a waiter, however, is different: it depends on ever-new decisions. I may say: I must leave now—or, I am that way—because I am a waiter, or a coward, as if being a waiter or a coward were a brute fact. Actually, this apparent statement of fact veils a decision.⁵²

We are not what we are—a portfolio manager, sales clerk, or a CEO—in the same sense that a chair is a chair because of the possibility of choosing our manner of being. To impose a fixed role in a story upon oneself, as though that were the nature of things, is, in short, to reject our awareness of human responsibility and freedom. Bad faith rests upon the dual aspect of human nature: being at once (1) a facticity and (2) a transcendence. Judgments of ourselves in bad faith “aim at establishing that I am not what I am.”⁵³ We affirm some aspect of our character, for example, to avoid the possibility of being different: the firm's budget administrator, explaining his explosive reaction to an erroneously completed expense report, quips, “Oh, I've always had this quick temper, it's too late to change now.” Or, standing on the possibilities of transcending our past selves, we say that the past doesn't count, that we're really different from that. Whereas we should be able to coordinate these two aspects of human reality, in bad faith, instead of valid coordination, we stand on or in a view of one to avoid taking responsibility for the other. “The goal of bad faith,” writes Sartre, “is to put oneself out of reach; it is an escape.”⁵⁴ By way of summary about bad faith, Sartre's translator, Hazel Barnes, offers a concise account:

It consists in not accepting one's responsibilities as a For-itself, in seeking to blame someone or something for what one has done freely oneself, in choosing to assert one's freedom only where it is expedient and on other occasions to seek refuge in a theory of psychological determinism. It is to pretend that one is born with a determined self instead of recognizing that one spends one's life pursuing and making oneself. It is the refusal to face the anguish which accompanies the recognition of our absolute freedom.⁵⁵

Thus, rationality, as the conscious and deliberate acceptance of the human condition, requires that we avoid the ever-present plays of bad faith, which undermine the authentic acceptance of our freedom and responsibility.

Summary of Key Points

We can distill the preceding discussion down to a few central tenets, which will help in relating Sartre's ideas to relevant problems in business ethics in Part 2.

 Existence precedes essence. In other words, what we do, how we act, determines our apparent character traits (or virtues). It is not that someone tells the truth because he is honest. On the contrary, one defines oneself as honest by choosing to tell the truth again and again. A “courageous” person is basically just someone who usually acts bravely. Each act contributes to defining us as we are. But at any moment we are free to start acting differently. We can always start afresh, making different kinds of choices than we have in the past.

 People are subjects, not objects. Humans are not objects to be used by corporations or other organizations. Nor are people to be “motivated,” “controlled,” or “molded” into roles, to act as merely a waiter, or secretary, or programmer, or accountant. Treating people as objects is contrary to treating them as free subjects. Our freedom is what constitutes our humanity.

 Choices matter. We are our choices. We cannot avoid or escape choosing. Opting not to choose is still choosing. Even if stuck in inevitable conditions, we nonetheless still choose how we are in those circumstances, for instance, what attitude to adopt with regard to our working at a job that we hate.

 Universality of decisions: although we may be choosing what appears to be for ourselves only, we are, in a profound sense, choosing for all humankind.56

 Bad faith (self-deception) poses a persistent and pervasive threat to living authentically. We act in bad faith whenever we regard ourselves first and foremost as objects—for example, our professional roles within organizations—instead of as free persons.

Part 2: Implications for Business Ethics

In considering the ramifications of these Sartrean reflections for business ethics, a few cautionary notes should be made. First, I am inclined to believe that, in its normative aspect, business ethics does not, nor should it, purport to mandate or restrict itself to any one theoretical orientation. Rather, normative business ethics is most successful and illuminating when it perspicaciously deploys the strongest parts of moral theories, which may harbor significant defects standing on their own, for instance, utilitarianism,⁵⁷ rule utilitarianism,⁵⁸ deontological approaches,⁵⁹ rights perspectives,⁶⁰ justice conceptions,⁶¹ contractuarian approaches,⁶² stakeholder conceptions,⁶³ and virtue ethics,⁶⁴ as needed for understanding and resolving moral problems in the real world. It is in that spirit that I recommend including Sartre's ideas along with some of the more conventional philosophical concepts listed above. One chief benefit of taking a Sartrean point of view on business ethics is to foster one's awareness that the deepest moral dilemmas are not quite as amenable to being objectively “solved” as applications of traditional moral theory have suggested.

Second, for business ethics to draw on philosophical concepts in interesting and illuminating ways no particular process needs to be deployed. Indeed, with a notion like authenticity, it would be odd to specify, say, particular corporate initiatives or business school curricula to promote “training in authenticity.” Any such regimen would no sooner be specified than it would become an insidious form of indoctrination, a front for imposters of authenticity. Thus, the points raised can only be sincerely transformed into practice by the art of inventive minds. Finally, as significant and potentially transformative as Sartre's concept of authenticity is, such a notion is certainly not the only one, and it is not necessarily the most important one for business ethics. It would pay to keep in mind a version of Dewey's phrase that it takes a good moral character to know when to raise the moral issue;⁶⁵ that is, perhaps it also takes an authentic character to know when to raise the question of authenticity. If character is interpreted from an “intellectual academic” standpoint, then the educational implications would run toward exercises in analytic and deductive skills, and so on. If character is interpreted from a socioemotional standpoint, then one might expect an emphasis on teaching approved or “rational” attitudes. If, by contrast, character is interpreted in light of Sartrean reflections, attention must be given in business ethics education to fostering the conscious and deliberate acceptance of the human condition of freedom in our manner of being, that is, authenticity. The short recapitulation of the main tenets of Sartre's view provided above suggests a number of points of attack for the present state of business ethics with regard to the task of fostering authenticity. The focal points to be considered are: (1) business ethics education, (2) managerial deliberation and decision making, and (3) corporate structures. In the following sections, fundamental changes in these areas that are prompted by a Sartrean point of view will be explored.

Changing Assumptions About Teaching Business Ethics

A Sartrean point of view suggests that, beyond learning processes of ethical reasoning, business students would be assisted by seeing that such reasoning processes are embedded in larger structures of action. In the delineation of reasons, the role of evaluator is critical. Reasons are constituted as one defines a situation, say, a Harvard Business School case study or an ethical dilemma. Situations are not simply the objective state of affairs or “the facts”; rather, situations come into being as one questions the facts from some point of view.⁶⁶ Thus, the coefficient of adversity in situations reveals as much about the manager or executive as about givens. The present custom in many business schools of taking the winner's view of history and of downplaying the extent to which economic decisions embody value positions and the moral dimension obscures the wider structures within which reasons are constituted. A treatment of “the facts” from conflicting points of view would begin to show (intellectually, at least) the import of choice of starting points in intellectual analysis. If point of view or attitude or, more generally speaking, created self has such a role in the constitution of reasons, it is not the original or generative element, for our choices actualize and specify what we are. Sartre shows how each of us has a fundamental project. Our free acts are always outlined for us against the backdrop of this project. We can see our choices in the selves we have created, and the projects that give meaning to reasons and motives are basic choices of ourselves in our modes of responding to the world. Surely business ethics educators in both the universities and the boardrooms can create many opportunities in the treatment of fiction and fact (contemporaneous and historical) to foster the intellectual apprehension of the role of attitude in the definition of situations; part of that apprehension involves seeing that there are alternative definitions and thus alternative attitudes.

Beyond the intellectual goal, businesspeople must be presented with opportunities to see that they could feel otherwise than they do. Others' characters provide an invaluable resource in this respect; the display of, say, gaiety, perseverance, or equanimity by others in circumstances where such is not a habitual response reveals more convincingly than moral maxims that one could be otherwise than one is. In response to these reflections, a critic might raise the following objection. People that enter business schools have already chosen their fundamental projects. Hence, they may well “freely” choose their motives, causes, and acts in terms of the ends that promote their project. But the project is usually to succeed, which means to gain power and make money. So what do they freely do? Upon entering the business world, graduates will act as the company tells them, so they and it can succeed, gain power, and make money. A reply to this objection would point out that, even granted that a business student's fundamental project arises within the conventional horizons of the business world, such a person must always choose how to act within the business world; her free acts may or may not reinforce the values of the business status quo. What is important is that a person be conscious of his or her freedom. Indeed, in today's emerging business world, rising expectations of corporate social responsibility, fueled by a scrutinizing public, media, and government are not allowing corporations to work exclusively on profit maximizing in the service of shareholders while ignoring impacts on other constituencies and on communities.⁶⁷ Thus, with the appearance of, on the one hand, massive scandals erupting in the business world,⁶⁸ and on the other hand, an increasing number of firms expressly devoted to social responsibility,⁶⁹ graduates of business schools are in a position to choose the kind of organization they want to work in, that is, one they perceive as having a fundamentally immoral, amoral, or moral management orientation.⁷⁰

Enhanced Intercultural Understanding Prompted by the Universality of Human Choice

A greater willingness on the part of both business schools and corporations to identify with diverse representatives of a common humanity appears to be an important consequence of adopting a Sartrean stance toward business ethics. As Sartre writes:

Every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value…. In every purpose there is universality, in this sense that every purpose is comprehensible to every man. Not that this or that purpose defines man for ever, but that it may be entertained again and again…. In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever epoch.⁷¹

Accordingly, business organizations should show respect for humanity in its variant manifestations. In particular, this entails an appreciation that the capacity for suffering is universal; compassion cannot be hemmed in by the boundaries of a particular nation, religion, or skin color.⁷² It is critical that this awareness is not confined to a mere dissemination of empirical facts about foreign cultures linked with the firm's operations—knowledge must be counterbalanced with a measure of emotional engagement. In efforts to foster intercultural understanding in business leaders, the importance of striking a balance between intellectual and emotional development is clear. As proponents of an “ethic of care” have shown,⁷³ the capacity to identify with the feelings and interests of others, and the ability to see what one's own and others' feelings are, is an important component of moral development.⁷⁴ Accordingly, insofar as moral development encompasses the attunement of attitudes and feelings, what one writer in the popular press has dubbed “emotional intelligence,”⁷⁵ corporate leaders should be prepared (which includes being properly trained) to deal with associates' feelings sensitively, especially when such feelings might range from guilt, shock, horror, outrage, to compassion.

An illustration will help clarify the force of this point. Layoffs are especially traumatic when managers ignore the way in which the message is delivered to employees. The manner in which people are terminated, including the kinds of words used to communicate the firing and the specific ways the day's events transpire, are of great significance in terms of perceptions of meanness and cruelty, on one hand, or kindness and compassion, on the other. The trauma impacts not only the person fired but also the colleagues left behind. Massive layoffs mean larger workloads for the people remaining. People missing the cut experience low morale. Productivity drops. They distrust management. Brutal downsizings, such as those conducted by CEO Albert “Chainsaw” Dunlap during his tenure at Sunbeam,⁷⁶ are an affront to the dignity of a firm's employees. Indeed, perceptions of a lack of goodwill in employee terminations often cause substantial harm to an organization in terms of sullied reputations and lawsuits.⁷⁷ From an existential point of view, such basic emotive concerns are, in the final analysis, all valid responses to much that business leaders may learn about the human condition upon adopting the basic attitude of authenticity in the Sartrean sense.

Confronting Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's lifelong companion, emphasizes the “ethics of ambiguity” in her reflections on the moral implications of Sartrean existentialism.⁷⁸ The ability of businesspeople to tolerate uncertainty is arguably an important characteristic to consider. There already exists an extensive literature on the centrality of the capacity for efficient thinking, problem solving, and general intellectual development for effective moral reasoning.⁷⁹