Abstract
Milton Friedman's article, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits,’ owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. It is false that business does, or would, operate exclusively in economic terms, that managers concentrate obsessively on profitability, and that ethics can be marginalized. These errors reflect basic contradictions: an apolitical political base, altruistic agents of selfishness, and good deriving from greed.
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Colin Grant is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Mount Allison University. He teaches an undergraduate course on “The Ethics and Ethos of Business.” His article “Giving Ethics the Business” appeared in JBE 7 (1988), pp. 489–495. Some of the journals in which he has published are: The Christian Century, The Dalhousie Review, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Modern Theology, Religious Studies, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, The Toronto Journal of Theology.
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Grant, C. Friedman fallacies. J Bus Ethics 10, 907–914 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00383796
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00383796