Sustainable ethical decision making in groups: Guidelines for operationalising a proposal by Jürgen Habermas

This paper offers a new perspective on decision-making and presents a process that can lead to sustainable ethical decisions. An operational definition is proposed for sustainable ethical decisions that are technically solvent, ethically responsible, and shared by the stakeholders involved. After an analysis of scholarly literature - from the Business Ethics as well as the management science perspective - in order to understand this process, serious limitations are found when decision-making is circumscribed only within the realm of an individual, which therefore indicates a need to transpose these ethical decisions to another level of analysis: the group. From there, accepting Adorno's critique of the violence that any human group can commit against itself, Habermas' communicative proposal is presented as the basis upon which the decision-making process can be structured. This paper presents two methods that are based on complexity science and operationalise a previous theoretical discussion on processes that lead to sustainable ethical decisions.