Abstract
I begin not with the need for business ethics, but at the other end—the idea many people have that there is no need for such ethics. That conviction is quite widespread among practitioners of economics, though it is more often taken for granted implicitly rather than asserted explicitly. We must understand better what the conviction rests on and why it may be mistaken.
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References
Stephen Leacock, Hellements of Hickonomics ( New York: Dodd, Mead and Co, 1936 ), p. 75.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; republished, London: Dent, 1910), vol. I, p.
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On this and related matters, see my On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Patricia H. Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Emma Rothschild, “Adam Smith and Conservative Economics,” Economic History Review,1992 (forthcoming).
On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 ).
Michio Morishima, Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’? Western Technology and Japanese Ethos (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Ronald Dore, “Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism,” British Journal of Sociology, 34 (1983), and Taking Japan Seriously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Economic Issues (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987 ).
Eiko Ikegami, “The Logic of Cultural Change: Honor, State-Making, and the Samurai,” mimeographed, Department of Sociology, Yale University, 1991.
Karl Marx (with F. Engels), The German Ideology (184546, English translation, New York: International Publishers, 1947); Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Murray, 1926 ); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1930 ). 66
The classic treatment of public goods and provided by Paul A. Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 35 (1954).
For a classic treatment of external effects, see A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920). There are many different ways of defining “externalities,” with rather disparate bearings on policy issues; on this see the wide-ranging critical work of Andreas Papandreou (Jr., I should add to avoid any ambiguity, though I don’t believe he uses that clarification), Ideas of Externality,to be published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, and Oxford University Press, New York.
A good general review of the literature can be found in A.B. Atkinson and J.E. Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980 ).
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Sen, A. (1993). Does Business Ethics Make Economic Sense?. In: Minus, P.M. (eds) The Ethics of Business in a Global Economy. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8165-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8165-3_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5795-2
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