Business ethics in the new millennium will confront both new and old questions that are being transformed by the changed pace and direction of human evolution. These questions embrace human nature, values, inquiring methods, technological change, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the moral role of business in all of these. The emergence and acceptance of technosymbolic phenomena may signal a slow transition of carbon-based human life toward greater dependence upon silicon-based virtualities across a wide range of human possibilities. The resultant moral issues call for a renewal and redefinition of business ethics theories and methods.

To achieve ethical corporate governance, directors’ first priority must be to examine their own structure and operation. If the board is vulnerable to charges of unethical conduct, it will have little credibility in its oversight role over the corporate culture of the organization. An examination of a positive model of corporate governance in the mutual fund industry provides an effective illustration of several ways to add ethics to corporate governance: 1) legislation; 2) jawboning; 3) peer pressure; 4) regulation; 5) training and reflection. While peer pressure and training are more effective than the others, all those methods taken together cannot solve every ethical lapse. Only individual board members, working together, can influence the conduct of the board and propel themselves and the organization towards a standard of continuing ethical excellence.

The dominant approach to the analysis of issues in business ethics consists in the articulation and use of a set of mid-level moral principles. This approach is geared to business practitioners who are not interested in the difficult problems of moral and political theory. I argue that this “practitioner model” is philosophically suspect. I show how the theoretical frameworks prominent business ethicists employ are insufficiently developed. I also show how many of their analyses presuppose substantive views about issues of social justice which they rarely defend or acknowledge. Since no neutral position on these issues is available, I argue that the only alternative is to address the problems such issues raise for the analysis of institutions and the conduct of persons acting under those institutions. I offer suggestions about how we can develop a more philosophically defensible approach to business ethics.

There is a long-running debate among legal scholars regarding the propriety and enforceability of SEC attempts to mandate disclosures of antisocial or illegal corporate activities that do not materially impact a company’s financial statements. This debate was recently revived by the issuance of SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 99, Materiality in Financial Statements (SEC 1999), which suggests that quantitatively immaterial information relating to unlawful transactions or regulatory non-compliance should be considered for disclosure. This issue has important implications for the accounting profession, although it has generally been ignored in the accounting literature. This paper reviews legal and ethical considerations raised by the issue of qualitative disclosures, and also presents the results of a preliminary empirical test of the impact of such disclosures on financial statement users’ judgments. The results of this study indicate that investors consider the nondisclosure of immaterial illegal acts to be unethical, and reject suggestions that such information lacks moral intensity. The results also suggest that immaterial illegal acts have a significant effect on investors’ perceptions of the quality of corporate management and the likelihood of investment in a company. This effect was more pronounced when the illegal act was combined with self-dealing on the part of corporate executives.

Demands have been growing upon firms to take actions in the interests of workers, the environment, local communities, and others. Firms sometimes have felt they could best discharge such responsibilities by cooperating with other firms. This, however, is suspect from the point of view of a purely economic interpretation of competition law, since interfirm agreements may raise prices and thus lower welfare for consumers. Should competition law remain focused on competition enhancing economic welfare, or be reformed to allow for acts of cooperation that are socially beneficial? To answer this question, the article provides a philosophical reevaluation of the deep-seated view that firms are merely private actors. It argues that demands of political legitimacy should also be addressed at firms cooperating together, and that standard views of democratic accountability should be broadened, introducing a model of delegated, sequential decision making which allows regulatory agencies and parliaments to control interfirm agreements.

Are corporations morally defensible sorts of entities? How might we go about showing that they are? Thomas Donaldson offers us the most detailed contractarian justification for the moral defensibility of corporations. In this paper I show how we can significantly develop this sort of justification to yield a more compelling contractarian justification, though one that is importantly conditional. The primary points I take up in this paper are these:

1. The question Donaldson poses to generate his contract is not quite as simple as may appear. The sort of transformation we need to consider is more complex than the sort Donaldson describes.

2. Partly because of considerations that arise in discussing the first point, the contract we are considering is a more conditional agreement. The terms of the agreement will vary depending on the kind of state we are assuming prevails. The sort of contract we want to draw up is at least a three-way contract: between society, productive organizations and the state. The sort of agreement we reach will have the following form: society a agrees to allow productive organizations of type b to exist if we assume state c will do various things (d1 to dn), productive organizations will do various things (e1 to en) and members of society will do various things (f1 to fn). Importantly, if state c is not doing d1 to dn, productive organizations may not be morally defensible.

3. The terms of the contract that can be derived would benefit from the introduction of some of Rawls’s apparatus.

4. When we consider the right questions, with more of the background institutions filled in, and when we include some more social contract apparatus, we get a better contract which fills in for us not only the obligations of business but, importantly, many obligations for government as well.

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.

In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thick-skinned managers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think of these two groups as conceptually productive partners.

This paper argues that the desirable features of postmodernism identified by Ronald Green are not exclusive to postmodernism; that to the extent these features are postmodern, they are not necessarily features of business ethics; that, with qualification, these are desirable features to include in business ethics; that the best way to accomplish this inclusion is by appealing to an Aristotelian model; and that postmodernism has implications for the legal environment of business.

In this paper we present six criteria for assessing proposed solutions to environmental risk problems. To assess the final criterion—the criterion of ethical responsibility—we suggest another series of criteria. However, before these criteria can be used to address ethical problems, business persons must be willing to discuss the problem in ethical terms. Yet many decision makers are unwilling to do so. Drawing on research by James Waters and Frederick Bird, we discuss this “moral muteness”—the inability or unwillingness to use moral language to solve moral problems—and suggest some underlying causes of moral muteness.

Business ethics is an eclectic blend of intellectual traditions that seeks to exam ine the question of “what should I do in my business relationships.” This paper attempts to widen this discussion by proposing an alternative view of the nature of ethical behaviour: ethical behaviour as a situated social accomplishment. From an ethnomethodological perspective, norms and rules have the status of interpretive aids which are used to negotiate an acceptable meaning for a situation; norms and rules are constituted by, and in part constitute, the situations in which they occur. While most work in business ethics has tended to reify ethical practices, this paper stresses the contingent and situational nature of ethical decision making. In addition to presenting an ethnomethodological perspective, this paper discusses the methodological ramifications of this perspective through an examination of three ethnographic studies of situated rule usage.

Fundamental theological and ethical themes of Luther’s thought and tradition provide a basis for appreciating both the role of business in God’s providential design and the importance of occupation for living out one’s Christian vocation. These same insights establish the ethical basis for a critical appraisal of the current practice of downsizing and its negative impact on the quality of individual lives and whole communities. While Lutheran ethics is realistic about the ambiguities of life, it is also an ethic of compassionate love seeking justice in the world of business as in all of life.

As the author of one book on the elements of game theory and another on the possible applications to ethics (Binmore [3,4,5]), I suppose it is natural that I should be asked to reply to Robert Solomon’s (13) claim that “game theory has been a disaster in ethics, and now it threatens to become devastating to business ethics as well.” However, I find myself somewhat at a loss as to know what to say, since the game theory he attacks is not practiced by any game theorists with whom I am familiar. At first, I thought this was because my friends and I were deemed to fall into the class of “refined” game theorists to whom Solomon is willing to grant grudging acceptance, but it turns out that their refinement lies in appealing to principles that contradict the essence of the game theoretic enterprise. My guess is therefore that the plain old “vulgar” game theory which he attacks is actually intended to be the same game theory for which John Harsanyi, John Nash, and Reinhard Selten were recently awarded the Nobel Prize. My strategy in replying will therefore have to be the same as those innocent men who are asked why they beat their wives. Instead of explaining why wife beating is a good idea, I shall have to insist that I don’t beat my wife at all.

In a recent article in this journal, David Faraci (2019) argues that the value of fairness can plausibly be appealed to in order to vindicate the view that consensual, mutually beneficial employment relationships can be wrongfully exploitative, even if employers have no obligation to hire or otherwise benefit those who are badly off enough to be vulnerable to wage exploitation. In this commentary, I argue that several values provide potentially strong grounds for thinking that it is at least sometimes better, morally speaking, for employers to hire worse-off people at intuitively exploitative wages than to hire better-off people at intuitively fair wages. Rather than suggesting that hiring badly off people at intuitively exploitative wages is permissible, however, I suggest that this gives us reason to think that employers can be obligated to hire worse-off people rather than better-off people and to pay them nonexploitative wages.

Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research.

Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded forms of liberalism, and Michel Foucault on the distinction between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, we provide a conceptual treatment and mapping of the ideological positions that constitute the bulk of modern scholarly CSR debate. Thus, we distinguish between embedded liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and re-embedded liberalism. We develop these four orientations in turn and show how they are engaged in “battles of ideas” over the meaning and scope of corporate responsibilities—and how they all remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary debates and developments in the field of CSR and corporate sustainability.

In this address, I distinguish and explore three conceptions of wages. A wage is a reward, given in recognition of the performance of a valued task. It is also an incentive: a way to entice workers to take and keep jobs, and to motivate them to work hard. Finally, a wage is a price of labor, and like all prices, conveys valuable information about relative scarcity. I show that each conception of wages has its own normative logic, or appropriate justification, and these logics can come apart. This explains some of the debate about wages and makes the project of justifying a wage simpliciter difficult. I identify which logic we should choose, since we must choose, and say what this means for how we should think about the justification of pay.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a popular device used by researchers to analyze such institutions as business and the modern corporation. This popularity is not deserved under a certain condition that is widespread in college education. If we, as management educators, take seriously our parts in preparing our students to participate in the institutions of a democratic society, then the Prisoner's Dilemma—as clever a rhetorical device as it is—is an unacceptable means to that end. By posing certain questions about the prisoners in the Prisoner's Dilemma, I show that management educators have created a Prisoners Dilemma, whereby they intellectually imprison themselves and their students by continuing to appeal to the Prisoner's Dilemma. These questions are not encouraged by the advocates of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Today’s international business environment is complicated by human rights abuses and social and economic repression in various countries. This paper introduces controversies with foreign investment in Burma to develop and describe alternative terms of global business engagement in ethically challenging settings. Two forms of engagement—unrestricted and constructive—and two forms of non-engagement—principled and sanctioned—are discussed. All four alternatives are examined for their ethical, social change, and cultural foundations. Additional considerations are posed in respect to constructive engagement, moral leadership by global business executives, needs for model building and evaluative research, and realities in the ethical context of global business.

Legal issues have long been a prominent part of the discourse of business ethics. This widespread attention to legal questions within business ethics arises primarily because specific legal issues are as a practical matter often intertwined with prominent ethical issues occurring in the workplace. Many of the central issues of business ethics—issues such as whistle blowing, insider trading, and workplace privacy—have significant legal dimensions.

But this widespread attention to specific legal issues obscures a more significant deficiency within business ethics. This deficiency relates to the consideration of law at a much more fundamental level. Business ethics lacks any developed awareness of the images of law within its discourse.

Unlike jurisprudence, the field of business ethics has little in the way of fully developed models or concepts of law. Rather, our understanding of the law here exists more at the level of images—general, unreflected-upon depictions of the law, determinate in some aspects, indeterminate in others.

Such images are epistemologically potent, containing unexamined assumptions and exerting an often unrecognized influence over the development of our knowledge. As such, they deserve our attention, especially within a newly evolving field such as business ethics. Of particular importance to business ethics is how such images portray the relation of law to ethics.