Business ethics can be viewed as consisting of three main areas of endeavor. These are: (1) a consideration of the ethics of business, that is, an examination of the application of broadly accepted ethical norms to business; (2) an field of academic research and teaching in which normative and critical examinations of business practices are subjected to ethical critiques and examinations of justifications; and (3) an applied endeavor by businesses to alter behavior to comply with broader societal ethics including law as a minimum standard (Buchholz, 1989) and more broadly, corporate social responsibility (Sheehy, 2015).
The common ethical approaches of teleology, deontology, virtue ethics, and pragmatism are used in all three types of business ethics endeavors (MacDonald, 2015; Ferrell et al., 2015: Fontrodona et al., 2013; Whetstone, 2001; Bradburn, 2001; Richardson, 1995). Teleologically, the.
