Business Ethics and Idealistic Ethics

In the first part of my final lecture, I recap the earlier lectures, with a focus on the four identities approach and on ethical liberalism and conservatism. In the second part, I define idealistic ethics and relate it to business ethics. I claim that idealistic ethics imposes not only a duty to avoid conduct wrongful for all valid ethical identities but also two more rigorous duties: first, a duty to avoid conduct permissible for some valid ethical identities, and, second, a duty to be guided by an ideal contrary to that espoused by some valid ethical identities. I conclude that there can be peace between business ethics and idealistic ethics within an individual, in which both forms of ethics are espoused and given their own domain. I further conclude that the matter is not so simple at the social level, where business ethics and idealistic ethics may be expected to remain contestants for power in perpetuity. As always, there is reflective poetry; a focus of the poems in the last section of the lecture will be India, where I travelled for several weeks in 2024 and which has a particularly rich heritage of idealistic ethics.