Just Business Arguments in Business Ethics

by Sandbu, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780205697755
• ISBN10: 0205697755
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-01-03
• Publisher: Pearson

Summary

This new first edition introduces business students, scholars, and practitioners to moral reasoning as it applies naturally in business.#xA0;#xA0; It "works through" rather than simply "presents" the moral philosophy's relevance to business, thus teaching students how to do moral reasoning as opposed to#xA0;just learning about moral reasoning. #xA0; By choosing#xA0;examples and questions#xA0;that show#xA0;students how one cannot make informed business decisions if you cannot think philosophically; the author identifies, develops, and critically appraises the main approaches in contemporary moral philosophy as they apply to the specific problems that business people confront.#xA0;

Author Biography

Martin E. Sandbu is the economics editorial writer for The Financial Times. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the Wharton School, where he previously taught the main business ethics course in the undergraduate curriculum for several years. He has appeared on the BBC World Service, National Public Radio morning edition, and CNBC among other broadcast interviews.

 

In his academic career, Dr. Sandbu has worked on questions at the intersection between economics, politics and philosophy and published across all three fields. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, and in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis, “Explorations in Process-Dependent Preference Theory,” was published in top academic field journals in economics and philosophy. His academic writings have analyzed topics including business ethics, distributive justice, preference theory, collective responsibility, deliberative democracy, and the political economy of development.

 

Dr. Sandbu’s interests range beyond the theoretical. His academic research has informed policy advice, including on natural resource governance in developing countries. He participates in the global policy debate through his contributions to the Financial Times’ editorial column and through opinion pieces in his own name in the FT and other newspapers. He has been invited to give numerous lectures, presentations, and panel appearances for the world’s top universities, national governments, intergovernmental organizations, top academic professional associations, and civil society groups.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Purpose of This Book	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Support for Instructors and Students	p. xv
The Business of Ethics: Reasoning about Right and Wrong	p. 1
A famous ethical dilemma	p. 3
Amoralism	p. 5
Ethical subjectivism	p. 9
Doing moral reasoning	p. 12
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 14
Two Extreme Views: Managing for Shareholders or Stakeholders?	p. 15
The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits	p. 17
Medicine for the people	p. 20
Managing for "stakeholders"	p. 24
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 28
Doing One's Job Well: The Ethics of Social Roles	p. 30
Ethics as playing one's role well	p. 31
Goodness, practices, and the virtues	p. 34
An Aristotelian approach to business ethics	p. 38
Business life and its telos	p. 42
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 45
Roles and Conventions: Confronting Cultural Conflicts	p. 46
Conventionalism	p. 48
The relativist error	p. 52
The limits of role-based ethics	p. 57
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 60
Ethics as Efficiency: Making Everyone Better Off	p. 62
Consequentialist ethics	p. 64
Utilitarianism	p. 66
"Efficiency" and the Pareto criterion	p. 70
Act- and rule-consequentialism	p. 74
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 76
Is Greed Good? Advancing Society through Selfish Action	p. 78
As if by an invisible hand	p. 80
Why the empirical premise is often false	p. 82
Why the moral premise is false	p. 89
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 93
Consequentialist Complications: Sacrificing One for the Many	p. 94
A trolley problem and a hospital case: two difficulties for utilitarianism	p. 94
Fairness and welfarist consequentialism	p. 96
Negative responsibility: Doing versus allowing	p. 99
Directed obligations	p. 103
Consequentialist retorts	p. 105
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 108
Self-Evident Truths? Imagining a World without Rights	p. 110
Self-evident truths?	p. 111
A world without rights	p. 113
Taxonomy of rights	p. 114
Examples of rights	p. 117
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 122
The Case for Rights: Justifying Right-Claims	p. 124
Relativism again: The Asian values debate	p. 125
Rights or "rights"?	p. 130
Rights, dignity, and consent	p. 134
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 140
Ethics as Equal Freedom: Respecting Each Person's Dignity	p. 141
The source of moral worth	p. 142
Universalization as a source of duties	p. 145
Autonomy as a source of rights	p. 149
The Kantian company	p. 150
The Kantian firm in the marketplace: Revisiting deception	p. 153
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 157
Fair Shares: Dividing the Value Added	p. 159
A particular right-claim: fairness and executive compensation	p. 160
The problem of "deservingness"	p. 162
Utilitarianism as a theory of justice	p. 166
Entitlements: Nozickian libertarianism	p. 169
Just and unjust inequalities: Rawlsian social contract theory	p. 172
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 177
Just Business: Fulfilling Social Contracts	p. 179
A social contract theory of business ethics	p. 180
Rights revisited: Shareholders versus stakeholders	p. 183
Relativism revisited: Social conventions and moral free space	p. 187
Partial compliance theory	p. 192
Conclusion	p. 195
Summary of the Argument in This Chapter	p. 196
Appendix: Suggestions for Supplementary Material	p. 197
Index	p. 203
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