On The Possibility Of Serious Business Ethics. Business Ethics As Bullshit? (PDF)

Akademische Arbeit aus dem Jahr 2019 im Fachbereich BWL - Unternehmensethik, Wirtschaftsethik, Note: 1,3, Universität Bayreuth (Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Eventhough it is booming, business ethics is widely regarded as an oxymoron. Confronted with this fact, two views are plausible: First, business ethicists can be seen as pitiable and misguided idealists aiming for a goal that will stay out of their reach. Second, they can be regarded as suspicious and probably dishonest communication talents, artfully hiding the fact that they are doing nothing - that it is for them as business ethicist in fact impossible to do anything. When the latter view is true, business ethics would appear in the form of a secret, since it keeps it a secret that it does not exist, as Niklas Luhmann notes.

This and other notions of business ethics as dishonest refer to the broader claim: "Business ethics is bullshit". This claim will be examined in this paper. The aim of this examination is to argue that we can describe the conditions under which serious business ethics is possible and to offer this description. The argument is grounded on a negative notion of 'serious business ethics': Business ethics is regarded as serious if and only if it is not bullshit. What this means in positive terms and with regards to different notions of 'business ethics', and which conditions must be fulfilled for this not to be the case will also be discussed. The underlying broad notion of business ethics is "theory for use in practice", dealing with the question "how to assert moral norms and ideals under the conditions of a competitive market economy".