ABSTRACT

Business ethics' is rapidly becoming the 'in' subject, replacing yesterday's 'social responsibilities'. Business ethics is being taught in departments of philosophy, business schools, and theological seminaries. Over the centuries philosophers in their struggle with human behavior have developed different approaches to ethics, each leading to different conclusions, indeed to conflicting rules of behavior. To the moralist of the Western tradition business ethics would make no sense. The moralist of the Western tradition accepts 'extenuating' and 'aggravating' circumstances. Casuistry was first propounded in Calvin's Institutes, then taken over by the Catholic theologians of the Counter-Reformation and developed into a political ethics by their Jesuit disciples in the seventeenth century. There is one other major tradition of ethics in the West, the Ethics of Prudence. Confucian ethics elegantly sidesteps the trap into which the casuists fell; it is a universal ethics, in which the same rules and imperatives of behavior hold for every individual.