A business is, above all, a social institution and a community of people who work and serve society through the production and distribution of goods and services, thereby creating jobs and wealth and contributing to human progress. Businesses contribute to the common good when they carry out their mission in a sustainable and conscientious relationship with those who are touched by the activity: shareholders, employees, clients, consumers, local communities, etc.
The thesis that was presented for discussion at the conference maintained that effective business management is grounded in good business science and robust ethical and anthropological conceptions of human flourishing. Because ethics are affirmative and not only prohibitive, it is not enough to consider ethics only in connection to fraud, misconduct, or other pitfalls. Because there is only one human ethic that can be applied to different areas of human existence, a general approach to ethics should be applied to business, rather than dividing ethics into subdivisions like “business ethics” or “family ethics.”
The conference papers were originally published with a preface by Carlos Cavallé in Rethinking Business Management: Examining the Foundations of Business Education, and republished with an introduction by John Haldane as Profit, Prudence and Virtue: Essays in Ethics, Business and Management.
