Enlightened Egoism and Its Discontents: Mapping the Business Case for Doing Good

Abstract Various voices in business ethics and wider discussions of ethical capitalism endorse instrumental or strategic reasons for being ethical. Yet this orientation has at times eluded sustained philosophical engagement by the business ethics discipline. This article addresses this gap by mapping and critiquing what I term "enlightened egoism"—approaches that draw upon instrumental reasoning to derive normative guidance without recourse to duties, rights, values, or questions of the good. Careful reconstruction reveals that enlightened egoist arguments combine descriptive claims about how business operates with normative conclusions about how businesses ought to behave. Variations in these descriptive claims yield three distinct subtypes—evidential egoism, ends-enclosed egoism, and evolutionary egoism—each prominent in contemporary business ethics discourse. Examples are drawn from stakeholder theory, ESG investing (including hedge fund Engine No. 1's engagement with ExxonMobil), and diversity hiring initiatives. Through immanent critique, I demonstrate that enlightened egoism exhibits fundamental instabilities, specifically around indeterminacy in criteria for action, failure to account for heterogeneity, and conceptual slippage into determinist accounts of behavior. These limitations suggest the need for more rigorous integration of instrumental reasoning within—rather than as replacement for—normative ethical frameworks.