Business Ethics & Other Paradoxes

Abstract

Business Ethics & Other Paradoxes by Jimmy Winfield, George Hull and Greg Fried is an attempt to demonstrate how careful philosophical analysis can help us resolve a number of deep ethical questions revolving around business - and specifically business in a South African context. This book is explicitly intended to serve as a textbook for business ethics courses in South African universities. And this is no bad intention: almost all South African universities are required to teach business ethics in some shape or form these days, and good business ethics textbooks are hard to come by. This book aims to fill this particular niche. In some ways this is a little unfortunate. This book has many strengths - it is uniformly excellently written, and it contains a great deal of lively, novel, worthwhile and penetrating philosophical discussion. It is a book that anybody who teaches a business ethics course in a South African university ought to look at. But I suspect that it would work better as a piece of popular philosophy aimed at intellectually under-stimulated and curious business executives than it does as a textbook around which to structure an undergraduate course on business ethics. While many of the individual chapters are highly valuable and interesting, as a whole the book tries to cover too much material, too quickly for it to serve as a pedagogically strong foundation for a business ethics course.