Evaluation of Six Psychological and Ethical Egoism Cases

Egoism has been widely researched in the psychological field. However, while egoism has been recognized as playing a seminal role in ethical research, the relationship between ego and ethics has not been given significant attention. There have been two main research foci for egoism: psychological egoism, which is a descriptive variant and ethical egoism, which is a normative variant. This study evaluates six seminal business cases to examine these two types of egoism, with the aim of classifying the egoistic actions/actors, commenting on the results of these actions, and suggesting the normative behavior that should have been adopted. The six cases have been selected from different sectors and were chosen because of the potential influence on different stakeholders such as employees, customers, shareholders, and society. The results showed that CEOs or company owners were usually the main egoist actors in the cases and the main egoist actions tended to be focused on financial matters. The findings however, were not surprising given that financial matters have been found to often lead to unethical actions.