business ethics

business ethics, branch of applied ethics that studies the moral dimensions of commercial activity, frequently but not exclusively with respect to corporations. It encompasses an extremely broad range of issues, including whether and how corporations—as distinct from their officers or shareholders—are moral agents; whether corporations have moral obligations or responsibilities (e.g., to local communities, to national governments, or to the natural environment) beyond the legal imperative of making money for their shareholders; the employment relation and employee rights; fair corporate governance; the ethical implications of advertising and marketing (especially to children and other vulnerable audiences); the limits of fair competition between businesses; how to resolve conflicting obligations to stakeholders (persons or groups who bear a substantial interest in or are substantially affected by a business’s activities); and even the morality of the profit motive and of capitalism itself. As an academic discipline, business ethics informs various practically oriented approaches to understanding and improving business behaviour and management, including corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and stakeholder management.

(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)

Much academic scholarship in business ethics involves application of historically significant ethical theories to problems perceived to be characteristic of business environments. Such theories include consequentialism—a popular specific version of which is utilitarianism; deontology, or rule-based morality, based in the thought of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant; and virtue theory, which has its basis in Aristotelian ethics.