Business Ethics Resources

Snoeyenbos, Milton, robert Almeder and James Humber (Eds.) (2001). Business Ethics. Amherst, NY: Prometeus Books.

Fully updated and revised, this contemporary classic discusses the powerful moral issues facing corporate America: conflict of interest, payoffs, trade secrets, product safety and product liability, hiring, drug testing, reverse discrimination, worker safety, whistle-blowing, ethical decision-making, ethical accounting and advertising practices, environmental responsibility, and the conduct of multinational corporations.

Here is an excerpt from the Preface of the book:

“Many of the job-related decisions corporate employees must make are moral in nature. Recognizing this fact, most institutions of higher learning now offer business ethics courses in an attempt to provide students with the tools necessary to make such decisions. As business ethics courses have proliferated, the number of texts designed for teaching such courses has increased as well. Unfortunately, however, many of these texts are flawed in one of two ways: (1) those that address issues of interest to business students are generally not philosophically sophisticated, and (2) philosophically sophisticated texts are often too sophisticated, concentrating on issues that appeal to philosophers rather than business students.
In designing this book a conscious attempt has been made to avoid both of these extremes. We began with the intuition that business ethics courses should be designed primarily for business students, and should therefore address the issues faced by business men and women in their professional lives. Furthermore, we felt that only “essential” elements of ethical theory need be considered; lengthy discourses on distributive justice, Kant’s categorical imperative, metaethics, and similar topics would only bore students and leave them with the impression that moral philosophy is unintelligible to all but a few “eggheads,” and totally irrelevant to “real life.”

To achieve our goals we worked closely with the College of Business at Georgia State University in an effort to identify moral issues relevant to business men and women. We have taught a number of business ethics courses to students enrolled in the school of business, and, in the process, a wide variety of teaching materials have been evaluated. Sometimes the extant literature did not fill our needs; and where we found this to be the case we wrote essays ourselves or commissioned others to write them. All the essays included in this text have been chosen for their intelligibility and their potential to encourage classroom discussion. The essays are not intended to solve moral problems. Rather, they raise moral issues and propose “bold hypotheses” that invite further discussion. Additional discussion is encouraged by the inclusion of numerous case studies.

Business students who work through this text will learn some of the essentials of ethical theory and will acquire the basic tools needed to deal with the types of moral problems they will face dining their professional lives. Again, the case studies illustrate the types of situation people are likely to encounter in business. On the other hand, philosophy students will learn a great deal about the business world and the problems confronting corporate employees. Both philosophy and business have much to gain by a closer alliance; and if that alliance is strengthened in any way by our text, we will count it a success. […]” (pp. 13-14)