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Journal of Business Ethics (2009) 88:707716 Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s10551-009-0331-6
Principles and Hypernorms Edwin M. Hartman
ABSTRACT. We typically test norms with reference to their usefulness in dealing with social problems and issues, though sometimes we use hypernorms to evaluate them. The hypernorms that we find most acceptable do not guide action in the way local norms do. They do, however, raise challenging questions that we should ask in evaluating any practice and its associated norms. In this respect, they differ from the principles associated with traditional, as opposed to modern, morality. As societies become more alike, in part as a result of globalization, they will face increasingly similar problems. Then their local norms will be more similar, and they will be more likely to share hypernorms. Insofar as we can agree to try to justify our hypernorms, we are likely to converge on the hypernorms characteristic of modern rather than traditional morality. But people are often attached to their old norms and so are not very good at seeing how hypernorms raise questions that challenge the old norms. Here moral imagination should aid in the adjustment process. A system of democratic capitalism is hospitable to a good kind of moral convergence.
KEY WORDS: principles, norms, hypernorms, moral progress, moral imagination
Introduction
Donaldson and Dunfee make much of what they call hypernorms. They claim in Ties That Bind (1999) that communities may have differing authentic (that is, widely accepted) norms that are all morally acceptable in what they call moral free space, perhaps because communities have somewhat different needs or interests or just want to come to different agreements. But while local norms often serve the interests of the community, they do not always do so, and they may have other moral shortcomings as well. For example, an authentic norm might license the vicious abuse of dissenters. Unjustiable norms Donaldson and Dunfee call illegitimate. We determine the legitimacy of a local ethical norm by applying one or more hypernorms, great principles based on settled understandings of deep moral values (p. 27), which set limits on the range of local norms that are morally acceptable. Theologians, philosophers, and wise people generally agree that, for example, no majority is justied in treating members of a minority group...