Can business ethics be theological? What Athens can learn from Jerusalem

Abstract

The work of philosophers in business ethics has been important in providing a systematic framework to analyze moral obligations of corporations and their many stakeholders. Yet the field of ethics as defined by the philosophers of the past two centuries is too narrow to do justice to what is at stake in the business world. Ethics in the theological perspective is not primarily concerned with analyzing situations so that one can make right decisions, but rather with reflecting on what is constitutive of the good life. Theological business ethics can apply a crucial corrective to the business ethics of philosophers by broadening the endeavor to include a vision of what constitutes a good life — of the kind of persons we want to be and the kind of communities we want to form.