Business Ethics

Abstract

Much of the diversity in the field of ethics results from the broad area that it encompasses. As one scholar stated: Business ethics is the application of ethical aspects to all activities. It applies to all the disciplines of a school. There are no boundaries. It permeates everything; it is not a separate form of analysis. The field extends from the ethics of individual employees to the moral conduct of giant multinational corporations operating in cross-cultural environments. In comparison with legal, medical, and engineering ethics a researcher finds that in ethics the conceptual reach is larger than for other domains. Another respondent said that business ethics have a penetrating influence on all the areas of business. The primary fissure in the field is the division between the phi losophy/religion area of normative ethics and the management/values area of descriptive ethics. This split is particularly noticeable in the research activities and scholarly writing, but it is also present to some extent in the teaching of ethics. It stems primarily from basic differences in the research methodologies of the two areas. But within each of these two segments there are also major fractures. The dif