This essay examines the impact of the imposition of businesses techniques, in particular, those associated with Total Quality Management, on the relationships of important components of the health care delivery system, including payers, managed care organizations, institutional and individual providers, enrollees, and patients. It examines structural anomalies within the delivery system and concludes that the use of Total Quality Management techniques within the health care system cannot prevent the shift of attention of other components away from the enrollee and the patient, and may even contribute to it. It speculates that the organization ethics process may serve as a quality control mechanism to prevent this shift and so help eliminate some of the ethically problematic processes and outcomes within the health care delivery system.

This paper describes how anticipated age discrimination in the form of disparate treatment induces behavior that in effect constitutes gender discrimination. Potential employers often exhibit a common pattern of behavior that acts to discriminate against older workers entering a specific workplace. Women, at a decision-making point early in their lives, are aware of this pattern of discrimination. They perceive that it is important for them to establish their careers before they have a family because it will be more difficult for them to enter the work force at a later age and excel at their careers. This anticipated age discrimination disparately impacts women, resulting in gender discrimination.

This paper is a response to a recent colloquy among Professors David Messick, Donna Wold, and Edwin Harman. I defend Messick’s naturalist methodology, which suggests that people inherently categorize others and act altruistically toward certain people in a given person’s in-group. This paper suggests that an anthropological reason for this grouping tendency is a limited human neural ability to process large numbers of relationships. But because human beings also have the ability to modify, to some extent, their nature, corporate law can organize small mediating institutions within large corporations in order to take ethical advantage of this grouping tendency. Within a corporate law taking seriously a mediating institution’s formulation of business communities, a virtue ethics approach can be integrated with a naturalist approach in a way that fosters ethical business behavior while mitigating the dangers of ingrouping tendencies.

Officials must understand why and how the public lost confidence in the federal government’s ability to manage financial turmoil. Officials outsourced to private parties responsibility for monitoring and policing the safety-net exposures that were bound to be generated by weaknesses in the securitization process. When the adverse consequences of this imprudent arrangement first emerged, officials claimed for months that the difficulties that short-funded, highly leveraged firms were facing in rolling over debt reflected only a shortage of aggregate liquidity and not individual-firm shortages of economic capital. Then, in September 2008, the president and other officials created an unwise sense of urgency that delays in implementation show to have been greatly exaggerated.

That authorities and financiers violated common-law duties of loyalty, competence, and care they owe to taxpayers indicates a massive incentive breakdown in industry and government. Taxpayers deserve a thorough-going reorientation of: (1) how regulatory agencies report on their regulatory performance and back-room interactions with Congress and the Treasury, and (2) the contract structures and performance measures used by the financial industry and its government overseers.

This paper investigates the broad ideological conflict between world views on corporate culture. Two views are identified: one encompassing standard liberal economic philosophy; the other taking broader notions of corporate culture from ethics theory. The conflict that surrounded the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle is used as an illustration of the current conflict between these views. The writings of Alasdair MacIntyre are employed as a means of elucidating and reconciling these two world views.

“International business ethics” is a fairly new field of investigation compared to “business ethics,” that already has a history of 25-plus years in North America, and, even more so, to the well-established disciplines of management, economics, and ethics. This new field is emerging not because it has been designed by academics, but primarily because international business itself has dramatically developed since the 1980s. It has brought about plenty of ethical implications and challenges. To a large extent, they affect not only “international” business but also “domestic” business, which are increasingly being interconnected, and reach far beyond the commonly defined “business domain.” This process of globalization with multiple dimensions is extremely complex and rather opaque and, therefore, needs a great deal of clarification through thoughtful and courageous business initiatives as well as academic expertise.

This paper will discuss the uncertainty of job tenure, inequality of wages in American business, and the challenges for a creating a new social and moral compact between employer and employee. I begin by arguing that business ethics scholars missed some of the disturbing trends in management thinking because they often focused on current problems in business rather than questioning some of the basic assumptions about the way businesses are managed. As Rochefoucauld observed (albeit in a different context) we were overtaken by the evils of the present and I would argue, this was because we didn’t pay attention to the past. Business ethics research, like management research, is often ahistorical and hence tells only part of the story. If we don’t know how we got to a certain problem, it’s really difficult to see where the present problem and our solutions to it might lead us.

This special issue of the BEQ focuses upon the convergence of two of the major challenges facing business organizations in our decade: ethics and leadership. Not all problems of business ethics are questions of leadership and not all of the issues of organizational effectiveness that have placed leadership and leadership development high on the agenda are matters of ethics, but the overlap is great.

Employment-at-will (EAW) is the legal presumption that employers and employees may terminate an employment relationship for any or no reason. Defenders of EAW have argued that it promotes autonomy and efficiency. Critics have argued that it allows for the domination, subordination, and arbitrary treatment of employees. We intervene in this debate by arguing that the case for EAW is contextual in a way that existing business ethics scholarship has not considered. In particular, we argue that the justifiability of EAW for a given jurisdiction depends on existing complementarities among the institutions that constitute the jurisdiction’s political economy. Notably, our view takes seriously the ethical concerns EAW critics have raised by showing how these concerns can be mitigated through public policy measures that do not require eliminating EAW.

Price discrimination is widespread in the American economy and sometimes can be defended as achieving socially preferable economic outcomes. However, the separation of markets required for price discrimination is often difficult to sustain. Sometimes those whom the seller wishes to charge higher prices are identified by imprecise markers. (Thus, as one example, airlines have traditionally attempted to identify business travelers willing to pay higher fares as those travelers unwilling to stay at their destination over a Saturday night.) Imprecise targeting complicates efforts to prevent strategies of circumvention and sellers sometimes resort to claiming that buyers are morally bound to observe rules which sellers cannot otherwise enforce. This paper examines whether buyers can be morally bound by sellers to put themselves into discriminated-against classes.

This paper takes the position that if, as often seems to be the case, there is a social consensus that consumers would not be morally obliged to sort themselves into categories precisely designed to achieve the goals of price discrimination, then there is, a fortiori, a social consensus that consumers are not morally obliged to sort themselves into categories which are only crudely designed to achieve the goals of price discrimination, and which may in fact be counterproductive.

In a recent paper Allen Buchanan makes a basic distinction between two types of ethical problems which arise in business: “genuine ethical dilemmas, in which the problem is to discover what one ought to do, when two or more valid ethical duties (or values or principles) conflict, and compliance problems, which occur when one knows what one’s moral obligations are, but experiences difficulty in fulfilling them due to pressures of self-interest or loyalty to group or organization.” Buchanan argues that most business ethicists believe that this simple dichotomy is exhaustive. He claims it is not and argues that there is a third area of concern that involves perfecting imperfect duties, or coming to “have definite ethical duties, where before there were at best vague ethical goals.” However, I wish to argue that there is a further area of concern in business ethics and this area does not involve deciding between competing moral principles, values etc, attempting to comply with known principles, or imparting determinate content to vague, non-specific imperfect principles of obligation (the subject of Buchanan’s recent paper). This sort of problem occurs frequently in the third world in circumstances in which the agent entirely fails to recognize the normative structure that underpins the considered options.

Many ethicists argue that contract theory offers the most promising strategy for regulating risks. I challenge the adequacy of the contractualist approach for evaluating the complicated, novel risks associated with some structured financial products, particularly focusing on risks to third parties. Structured financial products like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) divide a pool of financial assets into risk “tranches” organized from least to most risky. Investors purchase various tranches based on their individual risk-and-return preferences. Whereas contract theory holds that investment risks are ethically permitted (roughly) when everyone—including both parties directly involved in the investments and third parties—consents to them, structured financial products like CDOs show that even risks to which everyone consents are ethically problematic when they involve systemic risks of ruin.

Solomon’s article and Binmore’s response exemplify a standard exchange between the game theorist and those critical of applying game theory to ethics. The critic of game theory lists a number of problems with game theory and the game theorist responds by arguing that the critic’s objections are based on a misrepresentation of the theory. Binmore claims that the game theorist is in the position of the innocent man who, when asked why he beats his wife, must explain that he doesn’t beat his wife at all (Binmore, 2). However, even if we agree that the denial is true, we might still like to know why, if you are not beating your wife, do others consistently accuse you of doing so? Or, to get away from this rather sexist metaphor, why are critics of game theory like Solomon (according to game theorists) consistently getting game theory wrong?

While, as I argue in the first section, critics of game theory such as Solomon may misrepresent game theory, this misrepresentation is not entirely their own fault. The way in which game theory is traditionally presented is misleading. For example, students are usually first introduced to game theory through the prisoner’s dilemma. It is compelling drama, but lousy PR for the use of ethics in game theory. (You want to know what to do? Let’s see how two thieves reason.) However, while Binmore is right to argue that game theory neither assumes nor entails the theory of human nature that Solomon finds objectionable, Solomon is also right to argue that game theory is promulgated and applied with what appear to be a robust set of assumptions about human motivation. I argue in the second section, however, that in fact neither these applications of game theory, nor game theory itself, is committed to a particular theory of human motivation. Thus, while game theory is not able to provide a complete ethical theory (assuming that a theory of human motivation is essential to such a theory), it is not contrary to ethics. In the final section I note that Aristotle, rather than being the alternative to using game theory in business ethics, as Solomon suggests, actually points the way to an ethical theory that can combine a discussion of both game theory and “those nagging and controversial questions about what it is that people do and ought to care about” (Solomon, 7).

This article uses Arndt's depiction of marketing epistemology to suggest a possible explanation for the lack of emphasis on marketing ethics within the marketing literature. While a growing number of writers are turning their attention to the area, marketing's heavy reliance on logical empiricism has contributed to a disinclination in the development of this area. Only through recent and numerous revelations of misconduct has the discipline of marketing responded to its ethical dimensions.

This review offers a cautious acceptance of the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) developed by Robin, Gordon, Jordan and Reidenbach. While the contribution of the MES to future empirical research of individuals’ moral reasoning is welcomed, a number of reservations or criticisms are raised regarding theory confusion, instrument confusion, and fears arising when using the MES. I conclude that the MES is a valuable compliment to existing moral reasoning instruments — the Moral Judgment Interview and the Defining Issues Test — but not a replacement of these instruments.

Despite significant scientific uncertainties and strong public opposition, there appears to be an “iron triangle” of industry, government, and consultants/contractors promoting the siting of the world’s first permanent geological repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel, proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Arguing that representatives of this iron triangle have ignored important epistemological and ethical difficulties with the proposed facility, I conclude that the business climate surrounding this triangle appears to leave little room for consideration of ethical issues related to public safety, environmental welfare, and citizen consent to risk. If my analysis of the Yucca Mountain case is correct and typical, then some of the most pressing questions of business ethics may concern how to break the iron triangle or, at least, how to expand it into a quadrilateral that includes the public.