Do Businesses have a Moral Obligation Beyond what the Law Requires? (original) (raw)
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Theories of business ethics or corporate responsibility tend to focus on justifying obligations that go above and beyond what is required by law. This article examines the curious fact that most business ethics scholars use concepts, principles, and normative methods for identifying and justifying these beyond-compliance obligations that are very different from the ones that are used to set the levels of regulations themselves. Its modest proposal—a plea for a research agenda, really—is that we could reduce this normative asymmetry by borrowing from the normative framework of ‘‘regulation’’ to identify and justify an important range of beyond-compliance obligations. In short, we might think of ‘‘self-regulation’’ as a language and a normative framework with some distinct advantages over other frameworks like stakeholder theory, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and the like. These other frameworks have been under attack in the business ethics literature of late, primarily for their vagueness and their disappointing inability to distinguish clearly between genuine beyond-compliance moral obligations, on the one hand, and charitable acts that are laudable but not morally obligatory, on the other.
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In this paper, I try to define business ethics, the need for it and discuss if it is possible and necessary. I understand business ethics as a subset of applied ethics relating to business activity of human beings. I also explain the differences between ethics and law, especially business ethics and business law, as well as differences between business etiquette, and business ethics. I also argue that the rising challenge from China and India, strong independence movements in Latin America and prolonged socio-economic crisis in Western Europe, as well as the recent events in the US, made it no longer possible to ignore the ethical dimension of business activities. Finally, I signal the fundamental questions of business ethics, such as 1. What is ownership, and is it moral? 2. Are relationships between labour and capital based on sound moral principles? 3. Where is the border between ethical and unethical methods in fighting the competition? 4. What is the definition of “fair profit”? The conclusion is that as the “invisible hand of the market” rarely solves the ethical problems in business, so business ethics is really a necessity.