Bring Your Non-self to Work? The Interaction Between Self-decentralization and Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Spirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people's lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in Buddhist philosophy-skillful means and the middle way-to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency-the 're-centering' of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior-and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning.

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