Just Business

This book provides a powerful business explanatory framework for resolving business ethics issues whenever and wherever they arise, and an ethical decision model which can be used to manage the ethical problems of business in all their actual complexity and variety. As presented in "Just Business", business ethics is not an extraneous anti-business option: it is a rigorous, analytical business tool. By introducing conceptual clarity to business ethics, this book provides businessmen with solid arguments for rebutting trendy, but unethical, demands for social responsibility in business. It demonstrates that business's correct ethical concern is just business - nothing but business, but business which is just. Business is ethical when it pursues its proper purpose of maximizing long-term owner value, subject only to respecting distributive justice and ordinary decency. Distributive justice exists when organizational rewards are distributed on the basis of contributions made to organizational goals.
Ordinary decency is not niceness, but the conditions of trust necessary for taking a long-term view and for surviving over time: it consists simply of honesty, fairness, the absence of coercion and physical violence and the presumption of legality. "Just Business" offers a sustained argument to show that it is not necessary either to emasculate or to adulterate business for business to be moral, and provides solutions to key ethical problems of personnel, finance and corporate governance. Combining business realism with philosophical rigour, and employing a global perspective, this book should be of use to all who have dealings with business whether as employees or customers or lenders, shareholders or formulators of public policy.