Business Ethics: Key Concepts for Quick Review

Three positions on whether corporations should be held to ethical standards:
- Corporations as moral agents: corporations have moral rights/obligations; their decisions have moral impacts; should be held to ethics.
- Corporations as machines: corporations are not moral agents; only humans have morals; cannot ascribe ethical conduct to a corporation.
- Middle ground (author’s view): reject the fiction of the corporation as a human; individuals control corporate actions; primary moral responsibility lies with individuals; corporations are secondarily responsible.

Individuals are the primary sources of moral responsibility for corporate actions.
Corporations act through people; thus corporate acts reflect human choices.

Loyal agent claim: managers must serve the employer’s interests; duty to advance those interests.
Objection: this can justify unethical conduct if extended to government or regimes (e.g., Nazi Germany); loyalty can lead to moral harm.
Conclusion: loyalty has limits; moral and legal boundaries must constrain actions.

Loyalty to employer is important but not absolute; employees should not violate moral or legal standards.

Argument: in a perfectly competitive market, pursuit of profit should automatically align with social benefit.
Counterpoint: real markets are not perfectly competitive; monopolies exist; profit can be pursued by actions that harm society if costs are not internalized.

Uninternalized costs (e.g., pollution) or fraudulent gains can be profitable yet socially detrimental; market failures mean ethics may still be needed.

Question: if something is legal, is it ethical? This is a central issue to explore further (e.g., in relation to the Saldana case).

People differ in resources and needs; moral judgments must account for non-uniform societal conditions rather than treating everyone the same.