What's Wrong With Business Ethics

Abstract

The field of business ethics is trapped between two competing and flawed conceptions of corporate responsibility. On the one hand is the shareholder value model, championed by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, which claims that corporations owe positive moral obligations only to their shareholders. On the other hand is the normative stakeholder theory, which claims that corporations are morally obliged to secure the interests of a broad range of groups, of which share-holders are only one. In this paper I will argue that if it is to generate a viable account of corporate moral responsibility, business ethics will need to abandon both canonical approaches and adopt a new approach based on a more concrete conception of the business corporation. At the end of the paper I sketch what such a theoretical approach would look like. The argument is not only relevant to business ethics; it also has important consequences for Michael Porter's influential approach to competitive strategy.