ABSTRACT
‘Management’ and ‘ethics’ seem to have contradictory meanings. The concept to ‘manage’ presupposes to act on or dispose of someone else, while ‘ethics’ refers primarily to the part of the individual’s behaviour that is or is supposed to be – at least to some extent – in his or her control. The idea that ethics should be managed creates the impression that the limits of its manipulability are extended and that such efforts are trespassing into the individual’s intimacy. It would probably be more accurate to refer to the ‘management of moral practices’, if moral practices did not have precisely the meaning of objective recurrent behaviour, which cannot be submitted to one’s discretion or executive power. It is therefore difficult to imagine that the entire public domain, namely, ‘objective’ moral habits, together with the judgements and feelings, etc. that are associated with it, as well as all the moral exchanges that take place among individuals in an organization, can be controlled from outside. But we must admit also that people sometimes change the way in which they think or act in moral matters and the use of some methods or techniques could promote or deter particular lines of behaviour.
