{"title":"The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace: Reconciling Justification and Legitimation","authors":"Rebecca C. Ruehle","doi":"10.1017/beq.2023.4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity.","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Business Ethics Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2023.4","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"BUSINESS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity.
期刊介绍:
Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes theoretical and empirical research relevant to the ethics of business. Since 1991 this multidisciplinary journal has published articles and reviews on a broad range of topics, including the internal ethics of business organizations, the role of business organizations in larger social, political and cultural frameworks, and the ethical quality of market-based societies and market-based relationships. It recognizes that contributions to the better understanding of business ethics can come from any quarter and therefore publishes scholarship rooted in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields.