PHIL 322 Lecture Notes - Lecture 34: Business Ethics, Stakeholder Theory, Fiduciary

• School: University of Arizona
• Department: Philosophy Main
• Course: PHIL 322
• Professor: ALL

Document Summary

Substituting profit for self-interest yields the conclusion that business ethics must represent some sort of principled constraint on the pursuit of profit not an injunction to maximize it. It is simply not the case that the interests of shareholders always line up with those of workers, customers, suppliers, and other groups with an interest in the firm"s deci- sions. The shareholder approach to business ethics suffers, flrst and foremost, from the taint of moral laxity. It does not seem to impose enough obligations upon managers to satisfy the moral intuitions of many people. If managers really are to be regarded as fiduciaries of stakeholder groups it raises immediate difficulties with respect to questions of corporate governance. Hard to identify stakeholders therefore introduces arbitrariness to business ethics. Vocabulary of fiduciary obligation does not provide a useful way of formulating these constraints.