ABSTRACT
If what we understand to be ‘ethics’ is shaped by social context, then business ethicists need to try to understand that context. That is, unless they believe that God or reason will eventually deliver some eternal rules that will make equal sense in any place or time. However, as we have seen in the book so far, this prospect doesn’t look that likely at the moment. So what would it mean to understand social context? Business ethicists have certainly spent quite a lot of time writing about the things that managers should do, and a certain amount of time considering the relationship between their businesses and the states and societies that they are a part of. However, there is very little evidence that business ethicists have considered the opposite, the way in which social context has shaped business. Other philosophers, such as Aristotle, who we came across in Chapter 5, emphasised the close relationship between individual ethical action (ethos) and social political action (polis), but this isn’t something that has preoccupied business ethicists too much. In the next chapter we will look at the economic context of capitalism for some answers. In this chapter we will open out the question of the relationship between individual ethical action and social context, by looking at context in terms of business organisations themselves.
