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In its history as a self-conscious academic discipline, business ethics has proceeded through different theoretical phases. Its initial phase saw business ethicists engaged straightforwardly in applied ethics, offering arguments for or against business practices or institutions by applying some version of Kantian, utilitarian, contractarian, or virtue-ethics-informed arguments. Although this approach remains vital in business ethics, it was supplanted as a main activity for academic business ethicists by a shift toward “bespoke” theory making: business ethicists began developing business-ethics-specific theories tailored to the peculiar venues and practices of commerce. Examples of these include shareholder theory, stakeholder theory, and what Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee dubbed “integrative social contracts theory.” Although the development of these theoretical constructs is not wholly devoid of inspiration from mainstream ethical theory (see, e.g., the treatment of integrative social contracts theory in Chapter 6, Social contract theory), neither may they rightly be said to be mere applications of it. Whether more recent theoretical developments in business ethics continue the bespoke phase or constitute a new direction in business ethics theory remains to be seen.
At a higher level of abstraction, an important and unresolved question is the conceptual relationship between business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Are they two different names for the same thing? Does one circumscribe the other and, if so, which circumscribes which? These questions take on added importance with the emergence of sustainability as yet another banner under which ethical concern is expressed.
In this section’s opening chapter, Social responsibility, Florian Wettstein lays out the widely varying terrain of CSR, undertaking the difficult task of defining social responsibility as well as connecting the concept of CSR to foundational questions surrounding whether corporate entities may be regarded properly as moral agents. He explores subsequently the content of CSR (what are the social responsibilities of corporations?) and examines the relationship between what CSR scholars pursue academically and what business firms pursue practically under the heading of CSR. Wettstein closes with a consideration of emergent trends in CSR.
In the next chapter, Stakeholder thinking, Kenneth E. Goodpaster explores both the promise and the limits of stakeholder thinking as a moral paradigm in business ethics. This he does through the intriguing lens of conscience. If failures of business ethics are failures of conscience, the question arises as to whether stakeholderism is a conscience-supporting or a conscience-impeding model of business decision making. Goodpaster considers the relationship between stakeholderism and comprehensive moral thinking and concludes with a consideration of the implications of stakeholder thinking for business education.
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If the emergence of stakeholder theory marked a turn toward venue- or practice-specific theory in business ethics, perhaps the subject of Chapter 12, Integrative Economic Ethics: concept and critique, by Alexander Lorch and Thomas Beschorner, reconnects business ethics to larger questions of ethics and political philosophy. Delineating Integrative Economic Ethics’ attempt to link fine-grained questions of business ethics to basic questions of just political and economic institutions, Lorch and Beschorner take their reader through multiple levels of social and ethical analysis to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a perspective that seeks to embed the principles of markets into the larger considerations illuminated by discourse ethics.
Alexei Marcoux