Moral Theories and Applications in Business--Laurence Rohrer

Moral Theories and Applications in Business: An Introduction

Laurence Rohrer 

My overarching goal in this text is to provide a clear, concise, and comprehensible introduction to moral theory for students with limited or no background in philosophy. The idea for this text developed from my experiments using numerous sources for teaching business ethics since 1996. Over these years, I have struggled to find a text that offered the perfect balance of primary philosophical sources, business specific analysis, and useful case studies. Many of the comprehensive textbooks offered too little in the way of introducing moral theories, and often with no selections of the philosophers themselves. Others offer good coverage and discussion of many current issues but little in the way of in depth analysis. In this text, rather than create a single textbook that can do it all, I strive instead to introduce in some detail several of the most influential of the moral theories, and to critically clarify their scope and limits using a single recurring case study. The strategy is to demonstrate how our moral judgments change, and are differently informed by different moral theories. Each chapter offers a brief introduction and critical discussion of a different ethical approach. Excerpts of the philosophers whose works are seminal are included in each chapter. Thus, this book is not designed to be a stand-alone source for business ethics courses. It is meant to compliment other works, especially texts offering a good range of case studies, or perhaps a series of articles on contemporary debates in business ethics.

81 Pages

ISBN: 1-934849-59-6

ISBN13: 978-1-934849-59-0