Research Areas
Business and Professional Ethics
Business ethics and professional ethics are two relatively new fields that have emerged within the discipline of Applied Ethics. Each has received a good deal of attention from both academics and practitioners. Today, one can find many scholarly journals, books and treatises dealing with moral matters in business and the professions as well as many business policies, training programs and professional codes of ethics. Major trade associations and professional societies have also taken up the issues of ethics and how they pertain to their membership. At Carnegie Mellon, both are represented with specific courses offered in the Department of Philosophy as well as more general treatments in other Department courses, campus-wide lectures and workshops conducted for selected audiences.
The main goals of ethicists who work in these areas are to identify, address and resolve various ethical issues, problems and dilemmas that arise in the world of work. Among some of the thematic questions that arise in business ethics are the following: What, if any, are the social responsibilities of businesses? Under what conditions are managers obliged to become whistleblowers? How should multinational enterprises manage the problems of cultural relativism? In addition to these central kinds of questions, business ethics also includes such issues as workplace privacy, sexual harassment, employee rights, product liability and consumer rights, truth in advertising, and the nature of ethical managerial decision-making. Business ethicists proceed methodologically by taking the theoretical work of moral philosophy that throughout history has developed an assortment of theory, principles and concepts in ethics and applying these to the seemingly intractable questions of business ethics.
Professional ethics differs from business ethics in that it shifts the focus of attention away from the profit motivation of business to explore instead the obligations of individuals within the context of their professional lives. Here, one main concern is with the kinds of duties that professionals: physicians, engineers, attorneys, accountants, governmental officials, etc. have to their various stakeholders. Professional ethics also raises central questions that contain ethical issues, problems and dilemmas. There are across-the-board questions of ethics that pertain to the professions taken as a whole and there are profession-specific matters that are researched and examined by ethicists working in this field.
At Carnegie Mellon's Philosophy Department, Peter Madsen, who also serves as Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics (CAAE), has worked in both fields and teaches Philosophy Department courses in them. His current interest in business ethics deals with the problem of legitimizing policies that would regulate the market activities of multinational enterprises (MNE). He has argued that the Integrative Social Contract Theory, formulated by Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, can be used as a ground to provide ethical legitimacy for such policies at the international level