Is business intimately related to ethics or can the two be separated? I argue that examining this question by focusing on how the two areas might be separated is logically flawed. Examining how business and ethics are connected, however, can bear fruit. This examination shows that business is a proper subset of ethics. Understanding this intimate connection has two practical benefits. It removes the seemingly incommensurable conflict between financial and ethical responsibilities of managers and it gives us new and positive insights into Milton Friedman’s view that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

At the center of our article “Citizenship, Inc.,” is a puzzle about a metaphor. Are corporations really a kind of citizen, or like citizens in some real way, or is talk of “corporate citizenship” all just a misleading metaphorical extension of the age-old concept of individual citizenship? In this reply to four very spirited responses to that article, we will not be defending our particular analysis of that metaphor so much as joining our colleagues in reflecting on the question of what academics are doing, or should be doing, when they take on the vocabulary of politics and business in this way. What can philosophers or social scientists expect to accomplish by telling fellow academics, or fellow citizens, that they should be using concepts like “corporate citizenship” one way rather than another? Is there a respectable methodology for shoring up this kind of advice? Or rather, are we all engaged in some kind of urbane political discourse attempting to push a vocabulary most likely to favor our own preferred ideological positions? We had relatively little to say on these questions in the original article, but we found many of the most interesting critiques or “friendly amendments” in the responses to be essentially about these “meta” and methodological questions (or derived from different answers to them).

Hedge funds are targets of mounting ethical criticism. The most salient focuses on their opacity. Hedge funds are structured to block transparency for strategic reasons: that is, they systematically deny information to their own investors and to governments in order to protect their competitive advantage, even though the information they hide holds tremendous significance for the interests of both groups. In this article I will detail the ethical allegations made against hedge funds, showing why their opacity creates intractable conflicts that cannot be resolved through government regulation. Sometimes opacity be regulated away; but with hedge funds I show why it cannot because of “regulatory recalcitrance.” In the end a form of voluntary moral coordination, a form of “microsocial contract” instituted as an industry standard, is required relief. In a word, the solution to hedge fund opacity is ethical.

Confucian scholars express skepticism about rights. This skepticism is relevant to managers who face issues about the recognition of workplace rights in a Confucian culture. My essay examines the foundations of this skepticism, and the cogency of potential leading Western liberal responses to it. I conclude that Confucian skepticism is more formidable than liberals have recognized. I attempt to craft an argument that defuses Confucian skepticism about workplace rights while at the same time respecting the moral depth of Confucianism.

In my article “Understanding the Separation Thesis” I noted that most scholars in the business ethics field seemed to have accepted R. Edward Freeman’s argument to the effect that what he calls “the separation thesis” should be rejected. I argue, however, that they seemed to understand this thesis (and its rejection) in quite different ways. This volume contains three responses to my article which, interestingly enough, can be taken to corroborate my original argument. I here make some brief comments on these responses.

The question whether corporations should be used as a means for administering distributive justice is crucial. There are two fundamental issues associated with this. Firstly, would the introduction of rules have any distributional effect? Secondly, what would be the efficiency cost? In this paper, we explore both questions with reference to a job-security corporate rule. We show that the job-security rule will always produce distributional consequences which are consistent with its objectives. However, whether or not it is a socially desirable policy depends on whether the economy is at an efficient allocation and what motivated the policy. It can be shown that under some conditions, even if the initial allocation is efficient, yet not the socially desirable one, a corporate rule—like the job security one—may produce socially desirable gains. The same can be said in the case where the initial allocation is inefficient even in the presence of competitive markets (due to incompleteness problems). However, these social gains would come at the expense of competitiveness. In an internationally open environment this may offset the initial social gains from this policy. Whether or not this happens would then depend on whether agents have a social dimension to their preferences or not. If they do, their response to the initiative may offset the initial loss of competitiveness. Alternatively, society may face the dilemma whether to remain open to uphold local conceptions of distributive justice