Quite frequently, business periodicals feature articles on the importance of building and maintaining a “network” of business friends. Typically, these articles offer practical suggestions for “networking.” This article is a philosophical investigation of business friends, and business friendships. Relying upon Aristotle’s classic analysis, I argue that business friendships are instances of “incomplete friendships for utility.” Viewed in this way, much is revealed about what business friendships are; even more is revealed about what business friendships are not, It is perfectly natural to say that business friends use one another; this raises the issue of whether business friendships violate the Kantian “categorical imperative.” I argue that they need not, and that—so long as they are truly “friendships”—they do not. What this discussion makes clear, however, is that business friendships are in continuous peril of eroding into relationships that cannot survive moral scrutiny. I conclude with a few practical suggestions—and philosophical cautions.

We examine the writings of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman regarding their interpretation and use of the concept of self-interest. We argue that neither Smith nor Friedman considers self-interest to be synonymous with selfishness and thus devoid of ethical considerations. Rather, for both writers self-interest embodies an other-regarding aspect that requires individuals to moderate their actions when others are adversely affected. The overriding virtue for Smith in governing individual actions is justice; for Friedman it is non-coercion.

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.

Manuel Velasquez and F. Neil Brady apply the doctrine of double effect to business ethics and conclude that the doctrine allows a pharmaceutical company to sell a drug with potentially fatal side effects only if it also has the good effect of saving lives. This forbids the sale of many common products, such as automobiles and alcohol. My account preserves the virtues of the doctrine of double effect without making it too restrictive. I apply the doctrine to a pharmaceutical company’s decision to market a drug with dangerous side effects and argue that free markets often offer the best way to compare the good and bad effects of business decisions. I conclude that the doctrine does allow a business to sell a potentially fatal product that does not save lives, provided that it warns consumers about the danger.

This article suggests that there are individual differences in how people define important moral values, and that these differences are made manifest in differences in the situations. It identifies five dimensions along which individuals can differ in their understandings of values: 1) value category (where the value lies in the hierarchy), 2) agent (how voluntary the action is and whether it is morally required of the agent), 3) object (how close the self is to the object of the action; whether the action offends God) 4) effect (whether the effect of the action is to harm or help), and 5) intention (whether the intention of the action is to harm or help). It then addresses four important values entailing moral dimensions: respect for life, respect for property, honest communication, and respect for religion. The article suggests that empirical research, classroom teaching, and business practice can be strengthened by considering these dimensions.

Role modeling is widely thought to be a principal vehicle for acquiring the virtues. Yet, little is known about role modeling as a process. This paper surveys the behavioral sciences for insights about how one person can find the actions of another person so inspirational that the person attempts to reproduce the behavior in question. In general, such inspiration occurs when an observer sees a model similar to herself, wrestling with a problem she is having, such that the model’s accomplishments are seen as attainable. When the behavior modeled is moral, additional complications arise, not the least of which is the contemporary skepticism about anyone held up as a hero. The paper concludes with some suggestions about how organizations can facilitate the development of the virtues through role modeling.

The standard ethical issues of business, so familiar to those in business ethics, are all being transformed as the Industrial Age is giving way to the Information Age. In the Information Age companies are learning to do business in new ways. The computer has entered and is entering more and more into all the realms of business so that it leaves none of them unchanged. This means that marketing is done differently, that manufacturing is done differently, that management is done differently, and so on.

In 1995, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Engineering Education received a grant from the National Science Foundation to undertake a project aimed both at assisting Russian philosophers in developing curriculum on engineering ethics and learning how context affects the teaching of engineering ethics. The project began with three Russian philosophers visiting the U.S. to observe how we teach engineering ethics. The American members of the project then made three visits to Russia to be part of three different workshops that brought together Russian professors from a variety of disciplines to exchange ideas about teaching ethics among themselves and with the Americans. During these visits, three of the Russians asked if we thought American philosophers would be interested in hearing about the Russian situation. We were delighted by the question (especially since we had become fascinated with the differences in Russian ideas about ethics), and responded with enthusiasm for the idea of their writing such an article. The article that follows is the result of their endeavor to explain how business ethics issues arise in Russia. Among other things, the article reveals how Russia’s history and the experiences of Russians under the U.S.S.R create a context extremely different from our own, for thinking about (and teaching) business ethics.

In this article I address the tension between evaluative surveillance and privacy against the backdrop of the current explosion of information technology. More specifically, and after a brief analysis of privacy rights, I argue that knowledge of the different kinds of surveillance used at any given company should be made explicit to the employees. Moreover, there will be certain kinds of evaluative monitoring that violate privacy rights and should not be used in most cases.

I begin by recounting the market demands that created an opportunity for me to teach business ethics in the College of Business at St. Cloud State University. The AACSB and my educational institution focused amorphous social demands for better business practices into a specific demand for a philosophy Ph.D. to teach business ethics. I felt frustrated teaching business ethics because of my inexperience and the eclectic nature of the field. I, and many others, searched for something to unify the many topics of the field. This search was one of the factors that led to BEQ’s appearance in 1991. The first issue marked a milestone in the continuing search for theory and the legitimization of the field. It focused previous discussions and was remarkably prescient. While it is unlikely that we will reach a consensus about how to understand the field, if consensus ever comes close to occurring, I argue that it will not coalesce over stakeholder theory. I examine two theories that could be used as a grand unified theory (GUT) of business ethics: Integrated Social Contracts Theory and my own institutional theory that expands on the work of Douglass North’s view of economic institutions. I use the discussion of these GUTs to develop criteria of what a successful GUT might look like. Based on these criteria, I argue that the institutional theory has a better chance of succeeding, but recognize that business ethics GUTs are primarily heuristic; many different types of theories can be helpful. Lastly, I discuss whether it is pretentious and overbearing to argue for a GUT. I argue that it need not be.

The paper explores the problem of motivation in organizations. This problem arises because people may prefer to pursue their own interest instead of the firm’s common goals (the two underlying forces in any organization). First, the most representative economic proposals to motivate people are studied and summarized. The study leads us to the conclusion that those proposals do not mitigate the conflict of interests, because they do not make people pursue the common goals. To solve the problem, the common elements of the firm must be promoted. In order to be really “common,” those elements must be composed of “non-material” goods, which are the only perfectly shareable ones. They motivate workers by attracting their internal faculties, making the job more interesting and appealing, and providing it with a meaning. Finally, these considerations imply that a richer model of human motivation must be developed in order to reach more comprehensive conclusions.

Corporations are often considered as moral agents. Traditional ethical systems are directed toward human beings—how could human rules be expected to apply to corporations? In this paper an alternative system of ethics is proposed, tailored specifically for the corporate entity. I use the method of Aristotle, in which the character traits (virtues) that are conducive to the goal of human activity, happiness, are derived. For corporations, the goal is taken to be the traditional capitalist one of sustainable profit, and corresponding corporate virtues are derived. I argue that corporate virtues such as Efficient Production, Resource Management, Correct Pricing, and Right Relationship will be beneficial to human beings. It is profitable to consider the interests of human beings, because the corporation will avoid a costly war of offense and retaliation. A corporate ethics is developed that protects humans and has motivating force not based on human nature, but rather profit.

This paper examines two issues about professionalism and business that appear at first blush to be entirely separate. The first is the question of who counts as a “professional,” and whether, in particular, business people are “professionals.” The second issue is how acknowledged professionals that regularly interact with business, such as accountants, lawyers, and physicians, can find the moral free space necessary to maintain professional integrity in the face of financial pressures. Conflicts of interest for professionals working in corporations recur with disturbing regularity, and often have serious consequences. In the end I will show how both issues share a common solution. The solution involves understanding the normative function of the manager in the modern corporation, a function, I will argue, made more conspicuous by work over the last two decades done in the areas of stakeholder theory, corporate social performance (CSP), and social contract theory. The remainder of the paper is devoted to articulating these two problems and clarifying their common solution.

In this paper, the approaches of a sample of small firms to environmental issues in the UK and the Netherlands are compared. The study makes a contribution by addressing the lack of research on small firms and the environment, as well as offering insights into the influence that cultural, institutional, and political frameworks can have on small firm owner-managers’ attitudes to external issues. The environment is considered here as an ethical issue, drawing on work on the environmental responsibility of business by both Bowie (1990) and Hoffman (1991). It is argued that the approaches to the environment identified in this study by Dutch and UK small firm owner-managers do not fit in with the positions of either Bowie or Hoffman. The concept of stakeholder cooperation is proposed as a more realistic alternative.

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.

Private firms are uniquely positioned to provide significant relief to the misery that pervades the developing world. Global misery has persisted due to a variety of failures in the provision of relief by nation-states and non-governmental organizations, including corruption and the absence of strong background institutions in the countries in need of aid. In many situations, private firms have a comparative advantage over these entities in the provision of aid. Examples such as Merck and the cure for river blindness show how firms can use their specific competencies and knowledge to relieve misery through Direct Corporate Humanitarian Investment (DCHI). DCHI is legitimized by marketplace morality and is consistent with the role of business within society, including legal dimensions. Shareholders may formally approve a corporation’s DCHI strategy and all stakeholders may act in support of their moral desires with respect to the firm and its DCHI strategy.