Decision-Making in Business: Amoral?

Abstract

The papers which follow, focusing on business decisions and ethics, most taken from a conference on that subject, show clearly that they were written by people who seek after truth very earnestly. This is the first point to be made, a point of no small matter nowadays when in most conferences-and their number is increasing by leaps and bounds-the prevailing attitude is to score easy points while leaving the difficult and fundamental questions untouched. The second point is that these papers cover a wide range of topics. Indeed, they seem to cover all the basic approaches that can be taken to the topic of ethics in business decisions. Had the topics of these papers been chosen randomly there would undoubtedly have been some duplication approaching a Gaussian distribution. Instead we have a distribution resembling a straight horizontal line, hardly a matter of chance.