(A) Rawlsian Approach to Business Ethics Essays in Employment Relations and Corporate Social Obligations

Abstract

Business ethics remains a prominent but conceptually unstable field. Debates routinely oscillate between appeals to managerial virtue, stakeholder balancing, market outcomes, and corporate discretion, without a shared standard for assessing legitimacy. This dissertation argues that this instability arises from a category error. Business ethics is too often framed as a matter of optional moral beneficence or individual ethical conduct, when it is more properly understood as a problem of institutional justice. Once this reframing is adopted, the justificatory task becomes clearer and the available normative resources more sharply defined.