The Domain and Context of Corporate Ethics: Introducing Concepts and Directions

• Published in: Corporate Ethics for Turbulent Markets pp. 45 - 78
• Main Author: Mascarenhas, S.J, FR. Oswald A. J
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Emerald Publishing Limited 30.10.2018
• Subjects: Corporate culture; HR & organizational behaviour
• DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78756-187-820181003
• ISBN: 9781787561885; 1787561887

Executive Summary This chapter covers basic concepts, ethical theories, and moral paradigms of corporate ethics for identifying, understanding, and responding to the turbulent market challenges of today. The concept, nature, and domain of ethics, business ethics, managerial ethics, and corporate executive ethics are defined and differentiated for their significance. The domain, scope, and nature of related concepts such as legality, ethicality, morality, and executive spirituality are distinguished and developed. Among normative and descriptive ethical theories that we briefly review and critique here are teleology or utilitarianism, deontology or existentialism, distributive justice, corrective justice, and ethics of malfeasance and beneficence. Other moral theories of ethics such as ethics of human dignity, ethics of cardinal virtues, ethics of trusting relations, ethics of stakeholder rights and duties, ethics of moral reasoning and judgment calls, ethics of executive and moral leadership, and ethics of social and moral responsibility will be treated in a later book. The thrust of this book is positive: despite our not very commendable track record in managing this planet and its resources, our basic questions are: Where are we now? What are we now? Where should we as corporations go, and why? What are the specific positive mandates and metrics to corporate executives to reach that desired destiny? This chapter explores responses to these strategic corporate questions.