The Ethics of Business: A Concise Introduction

by Al Gini, Alexei Marcoux

In a field dominated by books that focus exclusively on the perspective of business in large corporations or that assume that business has a moral deficiency in need of reform, Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux offers students and business people alike a concise guide to what everyone ought to do when doing business. Where other books are organized topically, Gini and Marcoux look at the moral features of business that recur across topical areas, stressing the considerations that bear on business people whether they be corporate functionaries, principals in family businesses, or solo entrepreneurs who do it all, end to end. They present to students the essential concepts, ideas, and issues involved in ethics in business and emphasize the individual acting person and what it means to have character and integrity when doing business.

164 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Brendan Shea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this when I was considering which books to adopt for a business ethics course I'll be teaching next semester. There are good parts of the book (mainly the last few chapters), but there are also parts that are (very) bad, almost comically so. For example, the book pushes a version of virtue ethics that analogizes business with sports (on the idea that "competition fosters virtues" or something like that). This seems like a terrible theory to me, but I'd be willing to consider it, given the right argument. However, this book doesn't provide it. At one point, they give an extended argument that Ray Lewis is an example of a "virtuous" athlete (and presumably, by their lights, a virtuous person), while Randy Moss isn't. Given the fact that Ray Lewis was charged with murder (and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice), this seemed a bit insane to me. However, that's basically par for the course for this book--there isn't really much attention to detail or argumentation, and most of the sources they cite seem to be whatever popped on their most recent Google search.

I didn't actually get the sense that the authors were incapable of writing a good book on the subject (and their idea of focusing on issues of personal behavior rather than corporate governance actually seems like a really good one); it's just that this book seems like more like a collection of the off-the-cuff remarks than a carefully considered introduction to how one should think about these (sometimes pretty tricky) issues within business ethics. (In case it isn't obvious, I didn't adopt the book.)

[mayritareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read. Read it for a business ethics class and I see myself reading it for personal enjoyment

[George Bremner · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's clean, straight forward business ethics book from the philosophy perspective. The author uses Kant, Mill, and Aristotle as the foundation for discussing broad ethical issues in business. At 158 pages the is as advertised, A Concise Introduction.