2 The Rationale behind Business Ethics
In its simplest sense, the field of business ethics represents the meeting point between ethics and business, where business decisions and their implementation are evaluated in terms of the “right” (moral) and “wrong” (immoral). However, ethical decision-making is far from being simple, as is involves much greater complexity and debate (Trevino & Brown, 2004) than other ethical fields, even complicated ones such as bioethics. The main reason for this confusion is not only the themes of business ethics, but the difficulty to recognize the relevance of ethics to the business decision in question. For example, corporate governance standards are closely related to ethics, but the weight of the latter in the spectrum of this field (which also involves financial, legal and other issues) is not always clear, especially when ethical standards collide with other customs.
Thus, it is better to define business ethics through the types of responsibilities it does and does not deal with. That is, instead of suggesting “the best one way” of e.g. corporate governance, the business ethics school will emphasize the moral underpinnings of the matter and will support the decisions and