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Reflections on Business Ethics: What Is It? What Causes It? And, What Should A Course In Business Ethics Include?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Art Wolfe
Art Wolfe*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Abstract

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?

There are over 300 centers for the study of applied ethics in this country—why? The events which face our society today (income and wealth disparity, environmental degradation, etc.) are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beliefs that set our public policy agenda. Our beliefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.

Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call “business science,” e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own unique self in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , October 1991 , pp. 409 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1991

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References

Notes

1 Professor Roper has taken exception to some points herein, especially those which concern the “proper” role of someone like John Rawls in the course I propose.

2 Translations of the play itself are tough going. I suggest the professional synopses of the play available in any university bookstore. I have two: The Plays of Sophocles, Monarch Notes, at $3.75 and Sophocles, Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, Cliff Notes at $3.25.

3 Steinbeck, J., The Grapes of Wrath, 42–43 (Fiftieth Anniversary Ed., c 1939, 1967).Google Scholar

4 Id., at 45.

5 Id., at 52–53.

6 Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 175 (Second Ed., 1970).Google Scholar

7 Galbraith, J. K., The Affluent Society, 6 (Fourth Ed., 1984).Google Scholar

8 Quoted in Adams, W. and Brock, J., The Bigness Complex xiii of the Preface (1986).Google Scholar

9 S. Turow, One L, 81 (1977).

10 Id., at 82.

11 Adams, W., supra, note 8, at 12.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Cavanagh, G. F., American Business Values, Third Ed., Prentice-Hall, 250 pages, 1984.Google Scholar

13 Values must be distinguished from morality and ethics. Values are the criteria or standards upon which one acts, morality is the inquiry into whether action (directed t values) is good or bad, and eth cs is the study of how values and morals interact.

14 Quoted in Bellah, R. N., Madsen, k., Sullivan, W. M., Swindler, A., and Tipto, S. M.Habits of the Heart, 37 (1985)Google Scholar

15 Emerson, R. W., “Self Rel lance,” 1841, The Norton Anthology of American Literatur 891, Second Ed.Google Scholar

16 Bellah, R., supra, note 14 at 294.Google Scholar

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19 Id., at 3–4.

20 Id., at 21.

21 Id., at 6.

22 See, Wolfe, “Power in the American Economy: A Review and Commentary,” 27 Am. Bus. L. J. 131 (1989).

23 Jung, C. J., The Basic Writings of C. J. Jung, 143 Modern Library Ed., (1959).Google Scholar

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28 Mann, C. and Plumner, M., “The Big Headache,” The Atlantic Monthly, 42 (Octobe 1988).Google Scholar

29 Id., at 42.

30 Chicago Tribune, § 1, p 4, Col. 6 (Feb. 5, 1990).