Enriching Business Ethics

Over thirty years ago, Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "If America is to be civilized, it has to be done (at least for the present) by the business class who are in possession of the power and the economic resources . . . . If the American universities were up to their job, they would be taking business in hand and teaching it ethics and professional standards. " To the intellectual elites of his time, there was something of a minor in Whitehead's view. Few of them saw business as a civilizing force heresy and even fewer, feeling that business was not to be tamed, relished the role of the lion tamers. Not many today doubt Whitehead's wisdom. Organiza tions of wealth and power have accepted their corporate social responsibili ties, and universities have launched major efforts to provide ethical instruc tion for business personnel. So far as the scholars are concerned, they quickly came to realize the difficulty of an undertaking that seeks to redefine and apply moral criteria to a very complex corporate world. Philosophers, in particular, have learned (or perhaps have relearned) how their speculations on ethics must take into account the "living ethic" expressed in the American culture and here anthropologists, sociologists, and theologians were needed to provide an expertise that the moral manuals did not.