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This chapter focuses on the normative importance of what attitudes our actions express to others. Business is not conducted in a vacuum – rather, it is conducted against a background schema of social meaning. This chapter argues that the public meaning of our actions, what our actions express, is normatively important. The piece imports familiar norms regarding expressions from interpersonal morality to business ethics, such as those surrounding insult, blame, and gratitude. It argues that many of ethicists’ gripes across a range of business ethics topics – from disproportionate compensation to immoral investing – can fruitfully be analyzed from an expressive perspective.

We examine the moral and managerial significance of some empirical studies in cognitive psychology. We suggest that these results may plausibly be interpreted as expressing deontological commitments of experimental subjects, even though psychologists who discuss the results seem to suppose that they show that people are irrational consequentialists. We argue that the plausibility of our interpretation suggests how managers who wish to take seriously entrenched social views on morality might best craft corporate policy on corporate responsibility, and we suggest that the form of argument we employ may be regarded as a kind of appeal to reflective equilibrium.