Etica

FROM THE PREVIOUS EDITOR

The Limits and Prospects of Business Ethics
George G. Brenkert (Editor in Chief, 2000-2005)
ABSTRACT: Business ethics has made important strides over the past decades, but it has also suffered significant failures as witnessed by the long line of business scandals in the past half century. This paper discusses different forms that business ethics has taken inrelation to the goal of businesses acting ethically. In the end, it maintains that a major challenge current business ethics faces is the lack of an account of business organizations as they ethically develop and change both individually and systemically within social and political conditions. Even if business ethicists can rationally defend what businesses should be doing, unless we can relate this tohow businesses can come to operate in those ways, our normative arguments will lack power, persuasiveness, and effectiveness. Only if we are able to provide this analysis will our normative ethics fulfill the practical task it has taken upon itself.

INTRODUCTION USINESS ETHICS, as a normative undertaking, seeks to provide ethical insight and guidance to individuals in business, businesses asorganizations, and to society. As a practical endeavor, it seeks to have an impact on the ways in which people in business act, the policies they adopt, and the role that business plays within society. In its current form, business ethics is only about forty years old. Two dramatic developments trace this period of its existence. First, there has been a rapid increase in attention paid to businessethics (I include social responsibility here). Business ethics is much more widely discussed in 2010 than it was in 1970, The number of joumals, articles, and books on business ethics has vastly expanded, A nationwide organization, the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association, was formed in 1991, More recently, a Corporate Responsibility Officer Association was founded. Some corporations haveundertaken ethics initiatives both intemally and extemally, while many more have put out splashy annual reports on their responsibility or citizenship efforts. Large numbers of students take—or are required to take—courses in business ethics. There are chairs of business ethics and numerous centers devoted wholly, or in part, to business ethics. Anyone who uses a search engine to explore references to"business ethics" or "corporate social responsibility" on the Intemet will find an explosion of references over the past decades. Business ethics, it seems, has made a dramatic appearance.

B

©2010 Business Ethics Quarterly 20:4 (October 2010); ISSN 1052-150X

pp. 703-709

704

BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY

Second, there have been many, increasingly significant business scandals andfailures over the past four decades. The bribery scandals of the 1970s were followed by defense industry scandals in the 1980s and the S&L scandals in the 1980s and 1990s. Next came the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and the accounting scandals involving Enron and WorldCom. Most recently, we have had the financial scandals and crisis of 2006-2009, whose effects have been the most damaging andsignificant worldwide. After the accounting scandals there was significant soul-searching by many business ethicists regarding the effectiveness of business ethics research, programs and pedagogy. Interestingly, there has been much less of an outcry regarding the failures of business ethics during this latest and most injurious financial and economic collapse (2006-2009). However, the recent financialcrisis is particularly troubling inasmuch as many in business have sought to avoid any moral responsibility for this crisis. Instead, businesses such as Goldman Sachs or J. P. Morgan Chase only admit to having misjudged the levels of risk they took on. In addition, they have blamed the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too low, the govemment for not adequately monitoring various...