Santiago Mejia

Santiago Mejia joined the Gabelli School of Business in 2017 as an assistant professor in the law and ethics area, after earning his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Professor Mejia has a strong background in philosophy and ethics. His research interests span normative ethical theories of businesses, organizational behavior, moral psychology, and virtue ethics.

Professor Mejia’s research currently gravitates around three major topics:

1. Shareholder primacy, the view that firms should be managed in the interest of shareholders. He has shown that shareholder primacy is ethically legitimate, but that it imposes on managers and shareholders more stringent ethical obligations than typically acknowledged. He is currently exploring the normative justifications for shareholder primacy and the limits of this theory of corporate governance
2. Empirically informed approaches to virtue ethics. He has been exploring notions of virtue and human excellence that do justice to the empirical results from social psychology, behavioral economics, clinical psychology, and organizational behavior.
3. Socratic ignorance, the view that the highest form of human wisdom consists in the recognition of one’s ignorance about the most important human questions. He has been exploring what Socratic ignorance may have to offer to fields such as artificial intelligence, leadership, and the future of work.

Professor Mejia has been named the William J. Loschert Endowed Chair of Social Entrepreneurship during 2023-2025. He was awarded an Early-career scholar Sabbatical Research Fellowship by the Institute of Humane Studies, Fordham’s Distinguished Research Award for Junior Faculty in 2021, the Business Ethics Quarterly Outstanding Article Award in 2019, and the Society of Business Ethics Founders’ Award in 2016.

Website: Google scholar profile

• Ph.D.: University of Chicago, 2016 (MA awarded 2010)
• Bachelor's: B.A., Philosophy, Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia), 2002
• Bachelor's: B.S., Mathematics, Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia), 1999

• Business ethics
• Corporate governance (in particular, shareholder primacy)
• Moral psychology
• Virtue ethics
• Organizational behavior

• Santiago Mejia and Pietro Bonaldi (2024). “Maximizing Shareholder Welfare: A Normative Examination of Hart and Zingales’ Corporate Governance Account.” In: Journal of Business Ethics DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05551-5
• Santiago Mejia. (2023). “The Normative and Cultural Dimension of Work: Technological Unemployment as a Cultural Threat to a Meaningful Life.” In: Journal of Business Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05340-0
• Santiago Mejia and Joshua A. Skorburg (2022). “Malleable Character: Organizational Behavior Meets Virtue Ethics and Situationism.” In: Philosophical Studies. 179.12 pp. 3535–3563.
• Santiago Mejia and Dominique Nikolaidis (2022). “Through New Eyes: Artificial Intelligence, Technological Unemployment, and Transhumanism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.” In: Journal of Business Ethics, 178.1, pp 303-306.
• Santiago Mejia (2022). “Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics.” In: Journal of Business Ethics, 175.3 pp. 537–553.
• Santiago Mejia (2021). “Which Duties of Beneficence Should Agents Discharge on Behalf of Principals? a Reflection Through Shareholder Primacy.” In: Business Ethics Quarterly, 31.3 pp. 421–449.
• Santiago Mejia (2021). “The Peculiar Nature of the Duty to Help During a Pandemic.” Business Ethics Journal Review 9.2, pp 8–13.
• Santiago Mejia (2020). “Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics.” In: Journal of Business Ethics, pp. 1–17. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-020-04650-x
• Santiago Mejia (2019). “The Moral Imperatives of Humanistic Management.” In: Humanistic Management Journal 4, pp. 155–158
• Santiago Mejia (2019). “Weeding Out Flawed Versions of Shareholder Theory. A Reflection on the Moral Obligations That Carryover from Principals to Agents.”, Business Ethics Quarterly 29.4, pp. 519–544. 
• Tae Wan Kim and Santiago Mejia (2019). “From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Wisdom: What Socrates Teaches About AI.”,  IEEE Computer 52.10
• Dawn Lerman and Santiago Mejı́a (2019). “Positive Marketing, Virtue, and Happiness.” , The Routledge Handbook of Positive Communication. Ed. by José Antonio Muñiz-Velázquez and Cristina Pulido. New York: Routledge.