Models without Morals: Toward the Ethical Use of Business Models

Abstract

Given the recent revelations concerning illegal and, more importantly, unethical behavior in some of America’s largest and most respected corporations, this would seem to be an appropriate time to reconsider ethics in business. This article represents not so much a completed piece of research, but the beginning of a renewed discussion of ethics in business practice. It begins with a brief presentation of the highly reported recent events indicating the absence of ethics in modern business, and discusses briefly the role that ethics plays— or does not play—in the education of many of our top business people by America’s business schools. Rather than regarding ethics as simply the adherence to a set of universal moral values, this article is concerned with the ethical implications of model use in business and education. We take a complex systems slant on the nature of models and the ethical process of boundary identification and representation, which is