Buddhist belief and living ethics: challenging business ethics

Abstract

[Extract] 'Business ethics' can be problematized in a number of ways. The challenge to business ethics postulated in this chapter entails a questioning of received opinion regarding the temporal, geographical and intellectual predicates on which it is founded as an academic discpline and offered as a putative mode of engagement with the world. An examinatian of mainstream texts on business ethics suggest that, taken as a discipline, it emerged around the middle of the last century in the United States of America (Aasland, 2009) and draws on a variety of moral and ethical philosophical positions all of which can trace their origins to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment interpretations of classical schools (Parker, 1998; Parker et al., 2005). Academic business ethics thus draws, predominantly, from one or more forms of deontological, utilitarian/consequentialist or virtue ethics (taken singularly or in combination). These ethical positions all assume the self as the location for an ethical standpoint, or moral considerations. In contrast, we want to outline an alternative position, based on Buddhist ethics, developing the question, 'What would an ethical position entail that paradoxically cannot be located with the self?'