Abstract

Business ethics seeks to apply diverse ideas about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, the ‘good life’ and the ‘good society’ to the decisions, attitudes and behaviour of people and institutions in profit-making business, and it does so in order to understand or evaluate, and to improve. In the broad sense, this has been a millennial activity, coterminous with the very existence of ‘business’ , and it has gone on under diverse rubrics including those of social ethics, social thought, political economy or economic ethics, and within the disciplines of history, literature, sociology and politics. In the 20th century, and especially since the 1960s, a narrower-gauge subject has employed ‘business ethics’ as its explicit title.This has developed its own literature, journals and courses, academics, experts, networks and promoting bodies, usually within business schools or management studies, and with a markedly pedagogic or even ‘missionary’ tone. It is this more explicit, institutionalized and in a sense more ‘proprietary’ stream of ‘business ethics’ that I intend to criticize in this paper. Let us call it ‘conventional business ethics’ . I believe that this subject makes unwarranted claims for itself, while remaining somewhat insular and neglecting fundamental issues vital to ‘business ethics’ in the wider sense, and that it badly needs reconstruction.My criticisms are threefold and partly interrelated. They apply in varying degrees to all the current approaches, whether substantive or procedural in emphasis, whether related to utilitarian, deontological or other traditions in ethics, whether structured around social values, policy areas, management functions or stakeholder groups, and whether ‘problem-solving’ or more wisdom encouraging or ‘philosophical’. My first charge is of a-historicity. Far from ‘currentism’ assisting realism, it shortchanges proper empirical understanding of business persons, firms, sectors and decisions. My second charge is of a weak approach to the methods of ‘improvement’; a narrow view of the dynamics of desirable change. My third charge relates to a grave neglect of socio-political issues of mainly collective business influence. At issue here is a problem of micro market entrapment. Some of the most central ethical problems of business behaviour and belief are thereby bypassed, those relating to overall business roles, power and resources