Related disciplines

Business ethics should be distinguished from the philosophy of business, the branch of philosophy that deals with the philosophical, political, and ethical underpinnings of business and economics. Business ethics operates on the premise, for example, that the ethical operation of a private business is possible—those who dispute that premise, such as libertarian socialists, (who contend that "business ethics" is an oxymoron) do so by definition outside of the domain of business ethics proper.

The philosophy of business also deals with questions such as what, if any, are the social responsibilities of a business; business management theory; theories of individualism vs. collectivism; free will among participants in the marketplace; the role of self interest; invisible hand theories; the requirements of social justice; and natural rights, especially property rights, in relation to the business enterprise.

Business ethics is also related to political economy, which is economic analysis from political and historical perspectives. Political economy deals with the distributive consequences of economic actions. It asks who gains and who loses from economic activity, and is the resultant distribution fair or just, which are central ethical issues.

Business ethics is a contested terrain. There are economists and business gurus ^[237] who claim ethics is irrelevant to the field of business. For instance, the neo-liberal Chicago school economist Milton Friedman held that corporations are amoral and CEOs have only one duty: to maximize the profits of a company.

He also said in an interview that business cannot have social responsibilities^{[238][239][240]} Similarly Peter Drucker, a business guru, also observed, "There is neither a separate ethics of business nor is one needed".^[241] However, Peter Drucker in another instance observed that ultimate responsibility of the directors of the companies is above all not to harm – primum non nocere ^[242] The ideological position of excluding firms from ethical obligations is contested.^[243][244]

Business ethics is a contested terrain not just because celebrated persons in the field of economics and business questioned the relevance of ethics in business, observe editors of respected business ethics textbook, but also because what is presented in the name of ethics is either sentimental common sense, or a set of excuses for being unpleasant.^[245] What is presented as ethics in many of the Business Ethics manuals and books are just premature responses to questions that look like answers or mere procedural form filling exercises unconcerned about the real ethical dilemmas. For instance, a manual of business ethics published by good governance program of US Department of Commerce treats business ethics as nothing more than set of instructions and procedures to be followed by 'ethics officers' and downward in the hierarchy of business.^[78] Campbell Jones et al., in their text book, "For Business Ethics" point out six foreclosures, something has been closed down before it should have been, by the proponents of business ethics: foreclosure of philosophy, society, the ethical, meaning of ethics, politics, and the goal of ethics. Ethics, hotly debated throughout the twentieth century, has been one of the major sources of philosophical reflection up to the close of the millennium. The field of business ethics, it is contested, has insulated itself from the new developments in ethical debate, either ignoring them altogether or misrepresenting. Arguments in Business Ethics often downplay the role of social context, social arrangements, social processes, history, politics and structural aspects constituting individuals and individual actions. Issues taken as ethical dilemma by business ethicists are often narrow in scope, such as behaving politely with customers, following office etiquettes, protecting privacy of employees, avoiding discriminations, bribery, kickbacks etc., while issues like inequality among global labour, ethics of lobbying, intellectual property alienation, biopiracy etc., are broadly neglected. The term ethics connotes different thing to people oriented differently. There are arguments from virtue, deontological, utilitarian and pragmatic schools of thought about ethics. The differences are not just a matter of talking about the same thing in different ways. Rather, these different ways of talking about ethics seem to be talking about different things, about different ways of imagining ethics itself. Like discussions of ethics in any other fields, business ethics too should be treated along the percepts of various established, neglected and emergent schools of ethical thought. Business ethics is assumed to be something that does not really trouble basic assumptions about the normal practices of business. Instead of looking at the politics the corporate firms play in modifying rules of accounting practices, diluting labour laws, weakening regulatory mechanisms etc., and it tends to look at the ethical collapse of firms like Enron and Arthur Andersen as if it were isolated instances of individuals slipping away from their ethical responsibilities. Further, Business ethicists often foreclose the goal of being ethical. They attempt to convince that being ethical serves a strategy of image management or sustained profit making. Others hold being ethical and making profit are equally valid goals of firms, some others claim being ethical is just for the sake of being ethical.^[246] Further, Ethics, when remodelled as business ethics it suffers the fate of business expediency thus business ethicists prepare themselves for unambiguous quick and standard answers while ethics is not a matter of stable solutions but one of endless openness and difficulty and beyond the limits of normativity.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 910