"Business Ethics" Bigger than Corporate Responsibility

Chris MacDonald wants to know what's wrong with the term "business ethics"?

So why do people rebel against simply using the good old-fashioned term "business ethics?" Partly, I think, it's a matter of just not knowing what that term means, and the range of issues it encompasses. I speculate that there are 2 factors contributing to the confusion. One is the existence of so-called "ethics laws" and "ethics regulations", which tend to be codified rules governing things like conflict of interest, gift-giving to public servants, political contributions, and so on. I worry that the term "ethics laws" implies (wrongly!) that ethics consists of only those sorts of issues.

The other possible factor is the fact that when the idea of ethics comes up in the media, it's often associated with some scandal or another. This gives the impression that ethics is just the avoidance of certain kinds of wrongdoing — and to be sure, avoidance of wrongdoing is part of ethics, but it's just a part.

I don't know whether there's hope for the term "business ethics". I sometimes try to avoid using the term, in favour of just talking about specific issues. If the issue at hand is conflict of interest, let's focus on that, and on why COI is ethically problematic, and what to do about it. It matters less whether we say that avoiding and managing COI is part of "business ethics" or "CSR" or whatever. But on those occasions where we do genuinely need a blanket term, my vote is to go for the one with sufficient breadth actually to encompass the full range of issues at hand. I'd rather work towards correcting misunderstandings of the term "business ethics," instead of just capitulating to them.

Read it all here.