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Guiltless Guilt, Basis of a Critical Morality

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Citizenship in Organizations
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Abstract

Organizations are generally considered to be the rational context of individual behavior in order to achieve shared goals. Again and again an individual is able to create new causal chains of events in order to contribute to that achievement.

We will question this role of the so-called free will in a pre-given reality and of the individual as the nucleus of an organizational analysis. Since ‘free will’ is a basic concept in an ethical analysis, we also question the concept of ‘individual guilt’ in an organizational setting.

This chapter is a reworked and translated version of Hans Wesseling’s article Schuldloze schuld; basis voor een kritische moraal. Wesseling, Hans. 2013. In: Langenberg, Suzan and Wesseling, Hans. Over leven in werk. Cahiers Campus Gelbergen 2. Antwerpen: Garant/Campus Gelbergen, pp. 117–130. It was reworked and published with permission of Campus Gelbergen.

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Wesseling, H. (2018). Guiltless Guilt, Basis of a Critical Morality. In: Langenberg, S., Beyers, F. (eds) Citizenship in Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60237-0_7

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