Blackwell Reference Online

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Despite the jokes that everyone shares (“It must be an oxymoron” or “It must be a short course”), business ethics is a robust academic discipline that has yielded much fertile territory in recent years. Business ethics is the study of how ethics and business are connected and the analysis of ethical decision-making in commerce. One of the first questions that arise is, in fact, whether business and ethics can be connected at all. Indeed, there is often a presumption that “business” refers to a purely economic activity, which only coincidentally may have important consequences for others. In recent years the development of business ethics as an academic discipline has involved going beyond making simple connections between ethics and business. Indeed, there is a great deal of work being done on developing a set of conceptual frameworks, theories, and ideas in which ethical concepts are embedded in the very basic processes of business, which we shall call value creation and trade. Business ethics is both normative and descriptive; that is, it describes and evaluates individual and corporate behavior and practices that managers and corporations ought or ought not to engage in. In this regard, it also evaluates the role of government, law, and public policy in affecting business, both nationally and in international trade. Traditionally, philosophers working in business ethics have ... log in or subscribe to read full text