Are Codes of Business Ethics Ethical?

Willy Tadjudje () and Clément Labi ()
Additional contact information
Willy Tadjudje: University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Belgium
Clément Labi: University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Belgium

No 017WT, Proceedings of the 11th International RAIS Conference, November 19-20, 2018 from Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract: In response to a quickly evolving legal environment and more generally to changing conceptions about the role and responsibilities of the corporation and its executives, many firms have adopted codes of ethics whose legal relevance is uncertain, and whose relation to actual ethics is largely problematic. First, it is necessary to analyze the theoretical model of these codes, as business environments tend to be assessed in terms of “business ethics†, which is conceptually difficult not to discount, since ethics should possess a universalist vocation, hence the necessity to seek whether there could be a variety of ethics which could bear the same validity. More generally, can individuals (or corporations) bestow upon themselves any set of chosen ethical rules? We propose that ethical codes actually mimic and anticipate what legislators or judges have (or will have) considered as ethical behaviors. Since the law is itself an imitation of ethical rules, codes of business ethics are therefore imitations of imitations. The works of Kant and Levinas, in particular, will serve as points of reference.

Keywords: ethics; business ethics; ethical codes; corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of the 11th International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities, November 19-20, 2018, pages 123-128

Downloads: (external link)
http://rais.education/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/017WT.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smo:jpaper:017wt

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of the 11th International RAIS Conference, November 19-20, 2018 from Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eduard David ().