Wirtschftsethik und Unternehmensethik Zwei Kurzdarstellungen

Economic ethics describes the interaction of ethics and economics in explaining human action and in giving normative advice to ethically justifiable and efficient choices of action. As ethical economy, it analyses the ethical conditions of coordination in markets and the economic conditions of ethically legitimate behaviour. Ethical economy is a theory of the ethics and culture of the economy. Formal ethics is the pre-coordination of the economic coordination of the price system, material value ethics is the clarification of the value categories of goods and a general theory of value and good. Economic ethics is applied to the questions of incomplete contracts, professional ethics and the marginal ethics of an industry, and conflicts of interest. Business ethics describes the role of ethics in commercial firms and not-for-profit organisations. It is an organisational ethics and an individual ethics since there is organisational and individual failure to act properly. Individual ethics can neither be substituted for institutional ethics nor institutional ethics by individual ethics. The basic principles of business ethics in business interactions are mutual value creation and serving contracts. The role of the manager is not only to be the agent of the owners or shareholders but to be the fiduciary of the whole firm and to act in the common interest of the firm. The right incentives must be set in firms since there are also perverse incentives. Triple bottom line accounting that encompass ethical and environmental performance indicators introduces richer criteria of business success. Both articles are the longer versions of articles that were prepared for the leading German encyclopaedia, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in 30 Bänden, 21st edition, Leipzig (F. A. Brockhaus) Fall 2006.