Ethics and strategy in a theoretical framework of business ethics

In this article we define Business Ethics as an academic discipline that studies business from an ethical point of view. As such, it requires an integrated relationship between its two components: ethics and the company. As a result of the multiplicity of the concept strategy, we establish as a common ground for some of these definitions: the organization's search for adaptation to its environment. In order to understand the role of this concept of strategy in a theoretical framework of Business Ethics, we begin with the presentation of two reductionisms to which Business Ethics falls victim. Then we propose, in light of Lozano's model (1999), a triple conceptual theoretical framework for Business Ethics. From this approach we seek to demonstrate that if on the one hand a company's strategic management is forced to consider ethics as a requirement of organized civil society, on the other, strategic management, sensitive to society's demands for respect for customers, the environment and the quality of its products and services, does not exhaust the whole of what we call Business Ethics. The relationship between ethics and strategy must be the focus of an important question: is this relationship an organizational strategy that involves ethics or is it organizational ethics that involves strategy? In the realm of well-articulated Business Ethics we believe only the second option should be accepted.