Entrepreneurs as Entrepreneur Make Value Judgments: An Exploration into the Moral Implications of Entrepreneurial Goods and Services

Philosopher Richard Rudner (1953) eloquently argued that scientists, in their role as scientists and performing the tasks core to being a scientist, make value judgments. Scientists make decisions in assigning value, importance, and priority to overall endeavors, particular projects, and specific hypotheses which have moral implications. In other words, if we identify a minimal core of the scientific method which transcends context, which Rudner does, we find value judgments made by scientists. Scientists are not value-neutral or amoral in their endeavors. Rather, as he aptly titled his article, scientists, qua scientists, make value judgments (Rudner, 1953). In this paper, I argue that the entrepreneur qua entrepreneur - as the creator of future markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997) - makes value judgments. Entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship recognizes that the entrepreneur as an organization theorist, small business owner, business partner, financier, accountant, and strategic partner makes value judgments. Yet, the core of the entrepreneurial process - the tasks that transcend particular industries, locations, or forms - is the creation of markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997), and the recognition, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities begets value-laden technologies that have been neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship. These technologies are designed and implemented by the entrepreneur and later impact stakeholders of technology. For example, a bottle is designed to be completely biodegradable, a social networking site is developed to leverage relationships for advertising, or airport surveillance is designed to monitor citizens. Capturing the implications of goods and services on society is difficult and complicated; hence, the entire field of Science and Technology Studies has developed for that purpose (Johnson, 2006). Rather than view goods and services as value-neutral (e.g., “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”), technology is designed to facilitate certain behavior and beliefs. These goods and services, or these technologies, are studied closely within engineering schools as the technologies entrepreneurs take to market impact a variety of stakeholders. Rather than place the onus to analyze and modify the implications of goods and services on the adopting market, the entrepreneur can be viewed as uniquely positioned to oversee technology during a critical, formative stage of technological development. Within the ongoing analysis of entrepreneurship, we have yet to include a careful ethical examination of entrepreneurial goods and services. I leverage theoretical constructs within Science and Technology Studies to examine the moral implications of entrepreneurial goods and services. Through this expanded view of technology, we see the goods and services differently - less abstract and with more morally important features, biases, and values. Identifying the post-exploitation effects of goods and services on society has implications to the process of entrepreneurial activity. In turn, I revisit the role of entrepreneurs during the entrepreneurial process and suggest the implications to entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship when applying this new view of goods and services.As noted by Rudner, “To refuse to pay attention to the value decisions which must be made, to make them intuitively, unconsciously, haphazardly, is to leave an essential aspect of scientific method scientifically out of control.” (1953: 6). Similarly, by not explicitly acknowledging the values and biases of entrepreneurial goods and services, we are left with few tools to understand the moral implications of entrepreneurial decision making during the entrepreneurial process. This paper seeks to explicitly identify such value decisions of entrepreneurs by exploring whether, when, and how entrepreneurs qua entrepreneurs make value judgments in converting technical information into goods and services.