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<p>This paper argues that ethical agency in professional and organizational contexts is profoundly shaped by how agents normatively inhabit time. While business ethics scholarship has emphasized long-term thinking, sustainability, and character-based approaches, it has largely overlooked temporal orientation as a constitutive dimension of moral formation. The paper introduces the concept of transcendent temporal orientation to describe the disposition through which agents interpret present action in light of ends that exceed immediate incentives and local outcomes. Distinguishing between immanent-teleological and eschatological-teleological modes of orientation, the paper develops a framework drawing on MacIntyre’s account of narrative unity and practices, Aquinas’s teleology of beatitude, and Ignatian disciplines of discernment. I argue that while immanent frameworks extend ethical reasoning across time, they leave historical flourishing as the final horizon of moral intelligibility. Consequently, they are at a loss to render rational what I call non-redeemable moral loss -- forms of fidelity that permanently foreclose success within time. By contrast, an eschatological horizon relativizes temporal goods and thereby secures the intelligibility of principled sacrifice without expectation of restoration. This shift has direct implications for human dignity. When moral worth is no longer tethered to institutional effectiveness, recognition, or narrative recovery, the person can remain an end even in failure, exclusion, or defeat. Integrating virtue ethics, moral psychology, and organizational theory, the paper offers a normative lens for analyzing how workplaces cultivate the horizons within which dignity is either stabilized or rendered fragile. Recovering moral time, I suggest, is inseparable from recovering the conditions that allow persons to remain valuable when history offers nothing in return.</p>

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From Narrative Unity to Beatitude: Non-Redeemable Moral Loss and the Ethics of Time in Organizations

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月24日

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  • Kevin T. Jackson

摘要

This paper argues that ethical agency in professional and organizational contexts is profoundly shaped by how agents normatively inhabit time. While business ethics scholarship has emphasized long-term thinking, sustainability, and character-based approaches, it has largely overlooked temporal orientation as a constitutive dimension of moral formation. The paper introduces the concept of transcendent temporal orientation to describe the disposition through which agents interpret present action in light of ends that exceed immediate incentives and local outcomes. Distinguishing between immanent-teleological and eschatological-teleological modes of orientation, the paper develops a framework drawing on MacIntyre’s account of narrative unity and practices, Aquinas’s teleology of beatitude, and Ignatian disciplines of discernment. I argue that while immanent frameworks extend ethical reasoning across time, they leave historical flourishing as the final horizon of moral intelligibility. Consequently, they are at a loss to render rational what I call non-redeemable moral loss -- forms of fidelity that permanently foreclose success within time. By contrast, an eschatological horizon relativizes temporal goods and thereby secures the intelligibility of principled sacrifice without expectation of restoration. This shift has direct implications for human dignity. When moral worth is no longer tethered to institutional effectiveness, recognition, or narrative recovery, the person can remain an end even in failure, exclusion, or defeat. Integrating virtue ethics, moral psychology, and organizational theory, the paper offers a normative lens for analyzing how workplaces cultivate the horizons within which dignity is either stabilized or rendered fragile. Recovering moral time, I suggest, is inseparable from recovering the conditions that allow persons to remain valuable when history offers nothing in return.