The Production of Business Ethics (Essay‪)‬

Business ethics deals with practical problems of moral decision-making within firms. It has been relatively unconcerned about the systematic analysis of the implementation or application of business ethics. (1) Such analysis would have to start at a rather fundamental level, asking questions such as: Why do people choose to adopt any ethical orientation in their business? Why and to which extent do they invest any scarce resources to promote such orientation? In a next step, one would have to deal with the adoption of business ethics under the division of labor, asking questions such as: What role does it play whether people agree or disagree on such issues? How can disagreements on ethics be dealt with in firms? What are the possibilities and limits of coercing people to adopt certain ethical orientations? As these questions show, the systematic analysis of why and how business ethics is in fact put into practice raises problems that transcend the realm of business. We believe that, ultimately, such questions can only be settled on the basis of a general theory of the production of ethics, which at present does not exist. However, it might be useful to approach the elaboration of such a theory by focusing, in a first step, on the production of ethics in a commercial context: the production of business ethics. This is what we purport to do in the present article, within a comparative theoretical framework.