Advertisers and brokers bring buyers and sellers together, lawyers provide knowledge and advice, insurers provide risk reduction, speculators provide capital and liquidity, and so on. What has changed is the complexity of the human relationships involved, the scale and abstractness of the values at stake, the difficulty of evaluating the merits of competing values, and accordingly the ease with which errors about values and how to get them can be made. The purpose of business ethics is to discover the evaluative principles necessary to deal with the complex business world. Explicit, principled knowledge gives a business professional a framework within which to think, judge, and act consistently. Knowledge is power, said the philosopher Francis Bacon.
Ignorance is impotence.
Only with knowledge can the good can be achieved, errors avoided, and problems diagnosed. Selling and buying raises, for example, issues of fraud, liability, caveat emptor, and bluffing. Employment raises issues of merit versus affirmative action, the status of unions, drug testing and privacy, and whistle-blowing. Financial markets raise questions about the moral status of corporate raiders, junk bonds, and the property status of information. Corporations enjoy a special legal status, so there are questions about why corporations deserve it.