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Business and Consumer Ethics Summary VUB
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Summary of Business and Consumer Ethics for BA3 Business Economics at the VUB. Well structured summary without inessential information.
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Frédéric Kröger Business and Consumer Ethics - SummaryBusiness and Consumer Ethics – Summary
❖ Introduction
o TWO FORMS OF ETHICS
o Non-normative Ethics
▪ Non-normative ethics ➔ Objective is to establish what
factually/conceptually is the case (not what it should be ethically)
Ex. How does this person choose which commodities they buy
• Descriptive ethics
• Meta-ethics
o Normative Ethics
▪ Normative (prescriptive) ethics ➔ Based on standards of what is right and
judges all actions as right or wrong based on these standards
Study of how people should behave
Ex. You should not kill
• Fundamental ethics
▪ Virtue theories
▪ Deontological theories
▪ Teleological theories
• Applied ethics
▪ Bio-ethics
▪ Medical ethics
▪ Business ethics
▪ …
o General Remarks
▪ Negatively framed
• No super model of ethics
▪ Because ethics has to do with singularity, absoluteness, and infinity
• Ethics is not a form of praxis
▪ Ethics doesn’t make you good, it makes you think about the good
• Ethics is no moral education
• Ethics cannot and may not bypass personal and contextual specificity
→ “phronesis [prudentia]”
▪ Responsibility is something that cannot be shared, it’s you
▪ Positively stated
• Normative character
• Related to existing fields of morals
• Presupposes individual responsibility and autonomy of the will
▪ Relation with law (similarities but no reduction)
• Law = compulsory and enforceable
▪ Ethical law will never tell you what to do, it will give you bad consciousness
▪ You can never force someone to do the good, you can blame them
▪ Strength and weakness of ethics
• Legitimacy ≠ justice (‘jurisprudence’)
1
,Frédéric Kröger Business and Consumer Ethics - Summary
❖ Introduction : Against Business Ethics (Chap 1)
▪ This chapter outlines 6 problems with business ethics (BE)
▪ Each problem relates to a ‘foreclosure’, by which authors mean that
something has been closed down before it should have been
While, ethics is an opening and not a closure
o FIRST PROBLEM : FORECLOSING PHILOSOPHY
o Problem → The way business ethicists do philosophy
▪ Twentieth century philosophy is almost completely excluded
o Solution of the book → Bringing philosophy back into BE
▪ Rereading BE in the light of development in contemporary thoughts
▪ Turning to sources that have been pretty much ignored in Dvlpmt of BE
o SECOND PROBLEM : FORECLOSING SOCIETY
o Problem → Individualism
▪ BE downplays the role of social context
▪ Corporate scandals are attributed purely to the evil character of an individual
without referring to the situation that has shaped him in a way that is
common to other people (gender, ethnicity, class, age, …)
▪ Cannot hide context in which acts of misconduct take place
o Remark
▪ Individuals have responsibilities of their acts, but it always takes place in a
social context
o Solution of the book → Important to see both
▪ Individuals responsible for certain choices
▪ Context in which their actions took place
o THIRD PROBLEM : FORECLOSING ‘THE ETHICAL’
o Problem → BE rests on a narrow definition of what counts as ‘the ethical’
▪ Doesn’t consider everything it should (Ex. Contracts)
▪ BE does not exhaust the range of matters that concern people about the role
of businesses in the contemporary world
o Solution of the book → Authors raise ethical problems with stuff considered
business as usual
o FOURTH PROBLEM : FORECLOSING THE MEANING OF ‘ETHICS’
o Problem → ‘Ethics’ means a lot of different things
▪ Words like ethics don’t have a transparent meaning
▪ Different movements in ethics (talk about different subjects) have different
point of views on ethic itself
o Solution of the book → Look at meaning of ethics
o FIFTH PROBLEM : FORECLOSING POLITICS
o Problem → BE tends to deny the role of politics
▪ Related to third problem, but it goes further (what is BE willing to question ?)
▪ BE explain scandals such as small problems in a wide sea
o Solution of the book → Argue that BE could treat scandals as symptoms of broader
problem in contemporary business practice
▪ Also reconsider place of politics in BE
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, Frédéric Kröger Business and Consumer Ethics - Summary
o SIXTH PROBLEM : FORECLOSING THE GOAL OF ETHICS
o Problem → BE is often caught btw two conceptions of what it is for
▪ Two conceptions (often first one today)
• Reassuring and satisfying ideas that reminds us how to do right thing
• Threatens us by exposing us to difference, and that challenges us to think
and act differently
▪ BE often acts as a technology for reduction of undecidability
▪ BE has become something claiming to show what to do
o Solution of the book → Discuss arguments that ethics is not a matter of solutions but
perhaps better thought of as a set of problems
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