Introduction
The role of philosophy in business ethics is an especially appropriate subject because ethical inquiry has both its origin and developments within the domain of philosophy dating at least as far back to Plato’s Socrates’ inquiries into justice, the good, education, love, and politics. Insofar as business ethics is a species of the more general field of ethics, and insofar as ethics originated and developed within the field of philosophy since the commencement of philosophy, it is especially appropriate to come to an understanding of some of the many ways in which philosophy might contribute to the further development of business ethics.
Insofar as the evolution of the field of business ethics in business circles is concerned, philosophy is especially well-suited to outline and detail the nature, function, and value of business ethics, normatively speaking. The field of contemporary business ethics seems to have begun in the 1960s as a subfield of applied ethics, again,...
Notes
- 1.
The Journal of Business Ethics was founded in 1982 by philosophers Alex C. Michalos and Deborah C. Poff who served as its esteemed editors for decades and established it as the finest and most long-standing journal in the general field of business ethics. The contents of this journal helped to shape the field of business ethics until this very day.
- 2.
Amartya Sen refers to these rights as “laws in waiting” (Sen 2009).
- 3.
- 4.
Several articles authored by the world’s leading philosopher-experts on the topic of moral responsibility are published in The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review (Springer).
- 5.
It is also referred to as the “adverse publicity sanction” in Corlett (2014: Chap. 11).
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Corlett, J.A. (2018). Role of Philosophy in Business Ethics. In: Poff, D., Michalos, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_20-1
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