Business Ethics and (or as) Political Philosophy

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Heath ◽  
Jeffrey Moriarty ◽  
Wayne Norman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Past ◽  
Distribution Of Income

ABSTRACT:There is considerable overlap between the interests of business ethicists and those of political philosophers. Questions about the moral justifiability of the capitalist system, the basis of property rights, and the problem of inequality in the distribution of income have been of central importance in both fields. However, political philosophers have developed, especially over the past four decades, a set of tools and concepts for addressing these questions that are in many ways quite distinctive. Most business ethicists, on the other hand, consider their field to be primarily a domain of applied ethics, and so adopt methods and conceptual frameworks developed by moral philosophers. In this paper, we discuss some of the salient differences between these two approaches, and suggest some ways in which business ethicists could benefit from taking a more “political philosophy” approach to these questions. Throughout, we underline the importance of seeking greater compatibility among the principles used in normative theorizing about markets, regulations, corporate governance, and business practices.

Entrepreneurial Business Ethics and Good Governance

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-147
Author(s):  
Jayrusha Ramasamy Gurayah ◽  
Jayrusha Ramasamy Gurayah
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Poverty Eradication ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Small Medium Enterprises ◽  
Medium Enterprises

Small medium enterprises (SMEs) have proven and are known to be one of the biggest contributors to the economy of developing countries. Evidence shows that SMEs provide a number of job opportunities, which results in unemployment reduction, poverty eradication, and a bigger boost towards other economic activities. However, most SME entrepreneurs face an array of problems such as access to funding, building up international connections, getting appropriate knowledge and access to adequate technology. These issues are then further intensified by the lack of proper governance and the avoidance of business ethics by most SME entrepreneurs. Over the past years, the number of SMEs has grown drastically in developing countries (Nigeria, Algeria, Brazil, and Vietnam), which has also resulted in an increase in competition within the sector. This has given rise to the need to install the strategies of corporate governance with the aim of strengthening the competitiveness of SMEs.

Formation of Contracts: Gibson v. Manchester City Council

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Akhileshwar Pathak
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
City Council ◽  
The Other ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Modern Business ◽  
The Law ◽  
Manchester City

Business contracts are formed through negotiations, where the parties agree on some terms, disagree on others and keep yet others undecided. Over a period of time, they see themselves as having moved from being negotiating parties to contracting parties, settling on most of the terms. The law, however, states that a contract is formed when a person makes an offer and the other accepts it. The principle arose from the rudimentary trade practices in the past. The principles coming from the prior centuries and the modern business practices may not be in consonance. The Gibson v. Manchester City Council Case, a judgement of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, reviewed attempts to modernize the law.

What is (and Isn’t) the Matter with “What’s the Matter…”

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Monast
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Harvard Business Review ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Managerial Practice

Abstract:In mid-1993 a provocative piece on business ethics appeared on the pages of the Harvard Business Review. Andrew Stark’s “What’s the Matter with Business Ethics?” (1993a) found plenty wrong with business ethics, arguing that the product served up to managers and potential managers by traditional ethicists in their articles and classrooms is without practical value. Since it is supposed to be “applied” ethics, he finds something seriously amiss with a business ethics that offers nothing to help a manager resolve moral dilemmas in business. While some “new” ethicists are now beginning to appear, ethicists who are willing to get their hands dirty and acknowledge the legitimacy of normal business practices, the traditional ethicists continue to dominate the field and continue to offer a product unable to satisfy the manager’s needs. According to Stark, “[Business ethicists] have been too preoccupied with absolutist notions of what it means for managers to be ethical, with overly general criticisms of capitalism as an economic system, with dense and abstract theorizing, and with prescriptions that apply only remotely to managerial practice” (1993a, p.38). Or, as he puts it in a more detailed discussion, traditional business ethics fails because it is a deadly combination of “too general,” “too theoretical,” and, worst of all, “too impractical” (1993a, p.44). In short, the “old” approach is idealistic and academic, irrelevant to the rough-and-tumble of real business.

Rethinking the Very Idea of Egalitarian Markets and Corporations: Why Relationships Might Matter More than Distribution

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre-Yves Néron
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Relational Theories ◽  
The One

ABSTRACT:What kinds of markets, market regulations, and business organizations are compatible with contemporary egalitarian theories of justice? This article argues that any thoughtful answer to this question will have to draw on recent developments in political philosophy that are concerned not only with the equality of the distribution of core goods (or as John Rawls famously put it, with the “distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation”) but also with the requirements for equality of status, voice, and so on, in the relations between individuals and within organizations. The dominance of theories of distributive justice in egalitarian political philosophy since Rawls may have contributed, on the one hand, to the oft-recognized gulf between these theories and their theorists and, on the other, to discussions of corporate governance and business ethics. The main purpose of this article is to introduce business ethicists to some of the less-familiar features of recent relational theories of justice and equality, and to suggest that some of these notions may help bridge the gap between business ethics and political philosophy more generally.

scholarly journals Business ethics education

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-485
Author(s):  
Isaias Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Ethics Education ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Business Ethics Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Ethics

This paper makes the review of the literature dedicated to relevant social issues that have been addressed by business practices and the business ethics literature, especially during the past century. The review of practical literature is undertaken from the perspective of the practitioner and demonstrates that the business ethics literature has been lax in the sense that it mostly addresses specific managerial problems and personal ethics within the business environment.

scholarly journals Assetization: A technoscientific or financial phenomenon?

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
Philipp Golka
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Financial Assets ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Short Essay

Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa’s edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.

Business Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stakeholder Interests ◽  
Moral Theories

Chapter 12, the last applied ethics chapter, considers some controversies in business. How should a firm’s owners, and related agents such as managers or state bank directors, engage with others, particularly workers and consumers? The chapter argues that the communal ethic does a better job of accounting for intuitions about who counts as a stakeholder and how to prioritize amongst competing stakeholder interests than does utilitarianism or Kantianism. Roughly, rightness as friendliness entails that not all duties of beneficence are a function of need or voluntary assumption of obligation to aid; a firm can also have pro tanto moral reason to help parties because it has related on friendly terms with them in the past. The chapter also takes up the question of how the production process ought to be structured, arguing that while the Western moral theories could well allow an unconstrained managerialism, the communal ethic probably does not.

Toward An Ethic of Exchange

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryl Koehn
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Business Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Managerial Effectiveness ◽  
Business Managers ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Moral Commitment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Labor Practices

Robert Solomon has suggested that we now have collectively moved beyond the point of treating the notion of “business ethics” as oxymoronic. If the possibility of business ethics were indeed a settled question, then there would be little point in offering yet another investigation into the character of business practice and norms. But if the “we” of this claim refers to philosophers, other writers and the community as a whole, then Solomon's claim appears false. For we remain very much concerned about the morality of business. Our doubts regarding business legitimacy have been brought into ever sharper focus by the trend of the past twenty years to assimilate business to the so-called “liberal” or “learned” professions of medicine, the ministry and the law. For, as Paul Camenisch has noted, while the three liberal professions all aim at readily identifiable goods and display an “atyptical moral commitment,” it is far from clear that the end of business is good. Since prof its can be made through the distribution of products many would regard as immoral, using labor practices of equally dubious morality (e.g., slave labor), it is hard to see how business can lay claim, like the other professions, to a legitimating moral commitment. Business legitimacy has been further undermined by research suggesting that business managers’ “expertise” creates more problems than it solves; and that the much-touted science of managerial effectiveness is a sham since no such science of controlling human behavior either does or can exist.

scholarly journals Corporate Governance And Fraud

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Weston
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Early Warning ◽  
Early Warning System ◽  
Warning System ◽  
Warning Signs ◽  
The Other ◽  
Font Size ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Bank

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 34.2pt 0pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-AU"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The main bank fraud cases of the past decade are examined to identify warning signs that could and should have been recognised. Brown (2001 and 2004) has rightly highlighted doubling as a key feature of the Leeson and National Australia Bank derivatives losses. This paper takes a wider view of this and other similar events-the Allied Irish fraud, the Sumitomo copper case, the Daiwa Bank losses and the National Australia Bank case &ndash; and examines the other warning signs that could and should have been recognised. If these can be seen as easier to identify while the fraud is in progress than the doubling of transactions, then these may be used to structure an early warning system of some potency.</span></span></p>

scholarly journals Business ethics: A connection to good corporate governance implementation

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-194
Author(s):  
Sambas Ade Kesuma ◽  
Risanty Risanty ◽  
Muhammad Husni Mubarok ◽  
Citra Marisa
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Good Corporate Governance ◽  
Public Sector Organizations ◽  
Ethical Violation ◽  
A Company

The main purpose of this study is to discuss business ethics and good corporate governance implementation. Business ethics is the foundation of good corporate governance implementation in a company. The existence of ethics in the company is expected to be a benchmark for measuring moral values, especially policies. It is also expected that the application of good business ethics elevates the implementation of good corporate governance. The establishment of supervisory institutions in public sector organizations is also expected to be the best way to eliminate the ethical violation. Thus, good business practices and the environment in Indonesia can be achieved.

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