Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2015
Business ethics in the new millennium will confront both new and old questions that are being transformed by the changed pace and direction of human evolution. These questions embrace human nature, values, inquiring methods, technological change, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the moral role of business in all of these. The emergence and acceptance of technosymbolic phenomena may signal a slow transition of carbon-based human life toward greater dependence upon silicon-based virtualities across a wide range of human possibilities. The resultant moral issues call for a renewal and redefinition of business ethics theories and methods.
1 George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 102, 208. A similar perspective has been developed in David C. Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press and San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1995). Like Soros, Korten has establishment credentials.