Which Role for Business Ethics? Some Reflections on Peter Ulrich’s Statement

Ulrich’s overly brief programmatic summary of his conception of an integrated economic ethics is the result of his debate over the last twenty years about what he regards as the two dominant models of business ethics: moral economics and applied (business) ethics. In Ulrich’s reading, the former locates ethics within the strategic framework of business practice, while the latter merely attempts to remedy moral shortcomings in actual business conduct. Both seem uncritically to accept the parameters of free market economy along the lines of orthodox economic theory. Therefore they both fail by ignoring the need to establish the primacy of ethics in business on the basis of a “comprehensive vista” that restores politics as an integrative constituent in the interplay between economics and ethics and grounds questions of the good in a firm conception of right. Ulrich paints the picture of the alternative “we” are facing in stark strokes of black and white: Either the market can be “civilized” or civil society will be reduced to “a total market society.” Such civilizing of the market requires, above all, a consensus among all stakeholders (and certainly not only among shareholders) on “the legitimate and reasonable function of business in and for a well-ordered society of free citizens.”