PROFESSOR Miller, responding to Pamental, suggested that business ethics should be taught to (business) students by adopting or endorsing an ethical approach within which to discuss and evaluate business ethics issues. That is, when teaching business ethics, one ought to reveal to the students, one's own reasoned answers to the issues, and one's bias as between deontological and consequentialist approaches. Miller claims that otherwise, students get confused, having to choose between moral theories while having to decide on the morality of some specific business ethics issue.

This paper traces the historical roots of some of our current preoccupations with the ethics of business. Its central argument is that many of the contemporary criteria that we use to evaluate the ethics of business are not new; rather, they date back several centuries. This paper illustrates this thesis by comparing historical and contemporary discussions of three sets of issues: the relationship between ethics and profits, the relationship between private gain and the public good and the tension between the results of capitalism and the intentions of businessmen.

The fact that these tensions are inherent in the nature of capitalism, if not in human nature itself, does not make our contemporary concerns or standards any less valid. On the contrary, it underlies their significance. Contemporary discussions of business ethics constitute part of an ongoing moral dialogue with both deep secular and religious roots.

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?

There are over 300 centers for the study of applied ethics in this country—why? The events which face our society today (income and wealth disparity, environmental degradation, etc.) are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beliefs that set our public policy agenda. Our beliefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.

Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call “business science,” e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own unique self in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long.

My anger at the fishermen, I realize, was directed at the conspicuous costliness of their gear, the excessiveness of the new van, because otherwise, I would have to acknowledge them as other versions of myself. Frustrated because they were where I wanted to be and were doing what I wanted to do, I tried to divert the issue to how they were going about it all. I tried to make it an argument about character rather than envy.1

Having taught management ethics for several years, I have been repeatedly frustrated by the practical mismatch between management problems and moral philosophy…. Unless we can connect ethical theory more closely with management practice, we may be dressing our business curriculum windows with philosophical finery but failing to meet the urgent need for clarity of thought in management ethics.