Moral confrontation: An essential companion to moral imagination

This article proposes a model for justifying decisions that integrates both ethical theory and practice. The usefulness of basic theory and applied practice in justifying decisions is a subject of continued debate. This article sees both as useful. It approaches moral justification from the perspective of responding to incentives. In this justification process, moral confrontation is the process of using theory to identify and analyze incentives and incentive conflicts. Moral imagination is a process of thinking that relies on practical intuition, self-reflection, and moral ideals to reconcile the identified incentives and incentive conflicts. Both theory and practice play vital and complementary roles in this moral justification process. The primary belief is that the proposed combination of moral confrontation and moral imagination can lead to advances in both the theory and practice of business ethics.