Moral Distress in Bioethics and Business Ethics: Knowledge, Action, and Desire in Moral Conditions and Communities

“Moral distress” was introduced in nursing ethics to describe the experience of having the moral conviction about the right thing to do while having limited agency to enact it. It exists at the intersection of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral communities that influence our desires to act. Although moral distress has significantly impacted bioethics scholarship, it has had almost no presence in business ethics scholarship. We argue that moral distress is useful for understanding important problems of business ethics. We claim it may be missing from business ethics discourse not because it is not present but rather because it is ever-present, an existential condition brought on by the tension between profit maximization and other moral purposes. We consider how the moral communities of medicine and business can be morally supportive or distressing and set forth a taxonomy of moral conditions involving the relationship between knowledge, action, and desire.