The Future of Business Ethics: Corporate Form, Virtue Ethics, and Emerging Issues

This book presents not only many of Daryl Koehn’s historically well-known papers analyzing business ethics using Western and Asian virtue ethics, but also some of her more recent, previously unpublished work on the ethics and politics of the corporate form. This book presents not only many of Daryl Koehn’s historically well-known papers analyzing business ethics using Western and Asian virtue ethics, but also some of her more recent, previously unpublished work on the ethics and politics of the corporate form. Researching cutting edge issues emerging within the field, Koehn was the first business ethicist to describe and critique the new benefit corporations and to analyze multi-level marketing schemes. In addition, she is one of the few business ethicists to have delved into the purpose and nature of the early American corporation. This history is hugely relevant to what we mean by "corporate responsibility." Despite its relevance, this topic, especially the very early history of business corporations in America, has been largely neglected by business ethicists. In addition, this volume showcases the many illuminating insights that emerge when the practice of business is seen in light of classical virtue ethics and the modern conception of character. The Future of Business Ethics includes papers exploring both Aristotelian and Confucian virtue ethics and the modern Kantian concept of character. Finally, very little new work has been done within business ethics to pioneer new ways of thinking about why fraud occurs and about how to recover from corporate wrongdoing. The psychological approach to fraud and the analysis of corporate apologies presented in the third section of the book does this new spadework, making this book of great interest to all those working in the fields of business ethics and virtue ethics.