This dissertation argues that Confucianism makes a fundamental contribution to understanding why civility is necessary for the morally decent workplace. I begin by reviewing some limits that traditional moral theories face. I first contend that utilitarianism, an influential framework in business, is not capable of identifying the wrong in the lack of civility, since the utilitarian must accept that humiliating another is morally required where sufficient benefit to others will thereby result. Next, I argue that Kantian ethics, largely embedded in various socio-economic theories, is equally incapable of elucidating the wrong of incivility. For Kant, respecting a person means respecting him as an autonomous decision-maker, and yet incivility lacks any clear connection to autonomy. Finally, I claim that virtue has serious difficulty as well in addressing the disvalue of incivility, because virtue ethics has limited resources to explain the expressive dimension of act, the very dimension that determines important part of the value of civility. In the second part of the dissertation, I seek to establish a Confucian alternative, according to which, civility, the communicative aspect of proper ritual, is essential for humane treatment. For Confucius, humans may be sacred when they observe rituals culturally determined to express ceremonial significance. Just as the religious sacred that emerges in a religious ritual generates a certain set of manners that participants are obligated to observe, the secular sacred that emerges in human ritual generates a set of manners by which we are to be treated by one another. If you gratuitously depart from due rituals, your action may not be decent enough, because through flouting ritual you desecrate the other. I conclude that managers and workers should understand that there is a broad range of morally important rituals in organizational life and that managers should preserve the intelligibility and integrity of these rituals.
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