Preface

Summary

Ethics and Business: An Introduction is an accessible, yet philosophically rigorous, book that gives readers the conceptual apparatus necessary to deal with the range of topics that they are likely to encounter. It is aimed at undergraduate students and students new to philosophical language. It reframes the way issues in business ethics are presented in order to give students a more unified, consistent, and conceptually elegant introduction to the field. There are numerous references to contemporary cases and ‘real-life’ examples, and each chapter comes with a case and discussion points at the end. The cases are designed as a springboard for further thinking, and hence are relatively short and open-ended.

Although it is explicitly philosophical, I believe this book will be appropriate for readers without any prior training in the discipline – for example, graduate or undergraduate business students. Philosophy should never be intimidating – and, in fact, most people engage in it naturally and unselfconsciously without realizing what they are doing. So while some of the discussions occasionally involve technical language, as they would in any discipline, the substance is easily within the grasp of students and business professionals.

There are two major features that set this book apart. First, the conceptual framework deliberately sets up a way of approaching issues built on basic moral principles. We cannot hope to cover every possible topic in the field, but if we can develop a clear way of approaching any topic then we will have accomplished a lot.