Samenvatting

Over the past two decades, a practice has developed in the Netherlands whereby organizations capture the outcome of a moral deliberation in a separate document they call ‘moresprudence’. Part of the reason for doing this is that employees who did not attend the deliberation still have access to the knowledge developed by colleagues. Also, documenting them preserves the insights for the organization, even once employees involved in the development of this knowledge have left the organization. Several authors suggest that moral deliberation and moresprudence have the potential to play a key role in organizational learning about moral issues. However, it is not known if or how this currently unfolds in practice. It is also not clear what the role of the ethicist can be in a moresprudence development process. Based on the above, the central question of this dissertation is:

How can moresprudence contribute to sustained learning about moral issues by organizations?

The sub-questions of the dissertation are:

1. How do the processes of interpretation, integration and institutionalization proceed with respect to organizational learning about moral issues?
2. What determines whether moral insights are institutionalized?
3. How does moresprudence take shape and what role does the ethicist have in this process?

The research focuses on three of the four processes that are central to this model because in those three processes moresprudence could play a role. However, this research will also draw on theory about intuition formation where appropriate. Based on the literature on non-moral learning and on transfer of non-moral know ledge, the theoretical chapter argues that moral insights can become part of the organizational memory and contribute to learning about moral issues by organizations. As moral insights have characteristics of situated knowledge, these insights 283 are part of a practice and cannot be abstracted from it without loss of meaning. However, situated knowledge also carries elements that are transferable. Recent research shows that in principle the transfer of moral knowledge is possible (or at least not impossible). Therefore, developing moresprudence as a carrier of moral knowledge has the potential to support organizations in learning about moral issues.