TO MANY people the very concepts of business and ethics sit uneasily together. Business ethics, to them, is an oxymoron or, as an American journalist once put it, a contradiction in terms, like jumbo shrimp. And yet, in America and other western countries, companies increasingly wonder what constitutes ethical corporate behaviour, and how to get their employees to observe it. Management schools teach courses on the subject to their students.
Business ethics is suddenly all the rage.
Fashionable perhaps but also vague. But plenty of people retort that companies should not be in the business of ethics at all let alone worrying about social responsibility, morals or the environment. If society wants companies to put any of these ahead of the pursuit of shareholder value, then governments should regulate them accordingly. Thirty years ago Milton Friedman, doyen of market economics, summed up this view by arguing that there is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits. Even those who think companies do have wider responsibilities argue about the best way to pursue them.