Geert Demuijnck

This article presents a qualitative research about the way in which business leaders of a retail company gradually clarify the ethical responsibilities of their company – in an ongoing discussion of particular cases. It is based on 12 years of experience as an external member of the ethics committee. The aim of the article is not so much as to evaluate the different single decisions that were made and implemented to make the company meet high ethical standards, but rather to focus on three issues and on how they relate to each other: (1) the shift from a communitarian Christian set of values to a broader secular framework of basic principles; (2) the way in which business people in a retailing company cope with issues that seem ethically troublesome, when reflected upon from a ethical point of view; and (3) how the process of ethical dialogue has led to a typology of the different levels of responsibility that retailers are willing to attribute to themselves according to the kind of problem at stake. The three issues together illustrate how a company that took the business ethics question head-on systematically moved into a particular ongoing collective learning process.

In this survey of business ethics in Europe, we compare the present state of business ethics in Europe with the situation as described by Enderle (BEER 5(1):33–46, 1996 ). At that time, business ethics was still dominated by a mainly philosophical, normative analysis of business issues with a maximum of 25 chairs in business ethics all over Europe. It has since expanded dramatically in numbers as well as diversified into many different domains. We find this rich diversity in the conception of business ethics back in the answers of our respondents to every single question. The concepts they propose, the courses they teach, the subjects under research as well as the training and consultancy offered to clients and even the challenges for the future all reflect this diversity. Decisive for the expansion of business ethics in Europe has been the advance of CSR and the official backing of CSR by the European Commission. We further argue that the prevalence and importance of business ethics and CSR differs throughout Europe. A rough approximation based on our survey results and literature review is that it is more important and more developed in core and Nordic European countries and somewhat less in Southern and Eastern European countries. The real East with countries like Belarus and Bulgaria remains a challenge

On a general level, this paper proposes a critical analysis of one of the attempts to make bridges between economics and moral and political philosophy. A priori, we may expect that formal methods may lead to clearer and more rigorous arguments, and may facilitate practical applications. However, this paper illustrates how precision is bought at the price of becoming tautological. Therefore, the statement that "it is already widely recognized that formal methods derived from economics can contribute to ethics" seems hasty. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses some philosophical background assumptions which underlie a decision theoretic argument in favour of utilitarianism. Section 3 recalls briefly John Harsanyi's decision theoretic arguments in favour of utilitarianism. It then focuses on the crucial assumption of separability in order to show that separability can always be saved as an assumption if one applies the strategy of dispersion. Section 4, finally, shows how the theorem may indeed reconcile the concern for equality and utilitarianism, at the price of becoming futile.