This view may be closer to the one most U.S. businesspeople hold. The key, in this view, is to foster ethical people . Do so, and the group will naturally behave ethically. Again, the corporate ethics will somehow take care of itself. But both views are overly narrow.
Corporations have a relative level of autonomy as well as a level of freedom of action.
In a paper delivered at the conference, Georges Enderle, president-elect of the International Society of Business Economics and Ethics, proposed a view of the corporation that takes into account both its group nature as well as its ability to do right and wrong. In fact, that's precisely the point, Enderle insisted. While corporations have only a limited realm in which it can be said that they act with complete freedom, that realm does exist. In other words, not only is it possible to talk about ethical behavior on the level of individuals within a business organization, it is also possible to talk about whether a corporation as a whole is behaving ethically. Here, the conference demonstrated that shared values are very much alive and well.