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Linkages among ethics, philosophy and language can appear to be both obvious and obscure. They are obvious insofar that determinations as to what is considered right, in order to be coherent and persuasively communicated, must ultimately rest on a philosophical grounding. Beyond that point, these linkages can become obscured by vague generalities and platitudes. For those engaged in commerce the complexity of this situation is compounded since constructions of business ethics are marked by critiques of a lack of rigor and relevance (Dion, 2015; Gini, 2010; Marcoux, 2009; Sims, 1993; Weber, 1990). This holds implications for international business and leadership as the philosophers and concepts selected as the basis of ethics are informed by politics and culture (Purcell, 1977; Thite, 2013). For this reason, determining the pedigree of ethics within business publications provides a source for exploring this phenomenon and discovering the philosophical sediments which are foundational within a given socio-political context. Doing so benefits from placing philosophy and ethics within a socio-linguistic sphere.
Over a hundred years ago, it was understood that “ethical ideals and ethical endeavors…are objects of sociological research” (p. 672) and that “ethics is dependent on sociology” and that it varies “as its historical foundation varies under different historical conditions” (On the Relation between Sociology and Ethics, 1905, p. 673). Even at this early stage of development, language enters into the discussion, at least metaphorically. Hayes (1918) explained that “a philosophy is almost as necessary to civilized society as a language. The philosophy that civilized society must have is an ethics” (p. 289). This linkage is stated more directly by Mayer (1954) when he claimed that “philosophy and psychology, ethics and semantics are engaged in the search for standards” (p. 272). Understanding ethics therefore benefits from placing it within both a philosophical and socio-linguistic context. Recent contributions in this area have examined the contestability of truth (Horwich, 2014; Mackenzie, 2011; Ross, 2008) and semantic vagueness in ethics (Asgeirsson, 2015; Schoenfield, 2016; Sud, 2019). When one examines sufficiently large and complex datasets applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are likely beneficial if not essential.
While AI is not a new phenomenon (McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, Shannon, 1955; Turing, 1950), its prominence and application have increased (Bullock, 2019; Hirsch, 2019; Yaseen, El-shafie, Jaafar, Afan & Sayl, 2015). As Bullock noted, “the rise of AI’s capabilities will result in the augmentation and automation of cognitive tasks” (p. 754). Recent applications of AI have been found, among other areas, in business (Bergeret, 2019; Cubric, 2020; Weber & Schutte, 2019), education (Bonami, Piazentini, Dala-Possa, 2020; Kolchenko, 2018; Moyan & Yawen, 2020), health (Benuzillo, Savitz, & Evans, 2019; Chawla, 2020; Ishii et al., 2020; Luxton, 2014) and defense (Gill, 2019; Heller, 2019; Horowitz, Kahn & Mahoney, 2020; Stone et al., 2020; Whyte, 2020). For the purpose of this study the application of AI, as an analytic tool within corpus linguistics, is the primary concern. However, it should be noted that the epiphenomenon of the ethical application of AI emerges along with its use as a tool.