Toward a Moral Philosophy of Ethics: The Social Justice Case

In business settings, ethics is generally associated with corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is an ethical practice intended to demonstrate compliance and doing the right thing. In the social sciences, ethics applies a morals framework and links an individual to the social system and consequently to social identity groups that are marginalized according to society’s standards and perceptions. This perspective of ethics is a sharp departure from the business perspective of corporate social responsibility. Therefore, to be socially and morally responsible, consideration must be given to social identity and the lived experiences of social identity groups. This chapter will pursue the social justice case for ethics and will apply ethics as a moral philosophy strongly grounded in principles of justice, rights, liberty, and concern for the well-being, respect, and dignity of all humankind. Although ethics as justice has been applied in business and management studies from distributive justice and procedural justice approaches ethics is not commonly applied to problems emanating from the organizational social systems (e. g. racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, etc.) that ultimately produce unethical behaviors. Ethics as justice will be pushed to another level—organizational social justice. It is necessary to shift ethics for justice to another level, because the moral question is no longer, why are people not treated fairly? Rather, the question has become, why are people treated so unjustly?