Understanding Business Ethics is a text extracted from a book dedicated to business ethics. Since it has to do with a controversial issue – and quite misunderstood one – the author starts explaining what Business Ethics is, what it implies, and how it is regarded nowadays. In that framework, the first question that is often raised is basically: “Can business be ethical?” Since business seeks profit, how can it be moral? Most of people do think that business is unethical, which is not truly surprising if we consider many examples of corporate malpractices. At best, business is considered amoral, that is to say that business would have nothing to do with ethics (even if it is not necessarily pursuing bad purposes).

The text defines Business Ethics underlying that it is the way organizations address the issue of right and wrong concerning “business situations, activities, decisions.” It is worth noticing here that the word “business” refers to all organizations, and not only commercial ones.. even if the researcher chose to focus on commercial organizations, because they are mostly concerned by many ethical controversies.

Given Business Ethics is linked to the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ thing to do in a business situation, one can ask for the difference between Business Ethics and the law. The author’s answer is: the law is in a way “smaller” than ethics, because it encompasses much less issues. To say it otherwise, ethics are equivocal and controversial: unlike the law that impose what is the unequivocal right thing to do for each given situation, ethics helps us making better decisions.

What about morality and its link with ethics? Morality, the author said, refers to social rules, values and norms that define the right and the wrong for an individual or a community. Then, it seems obvious that ‘ethics’ must be defined more precisely. Indeed, when it comes to the difference between ethics and morality, the text underlined the use of reason that is supposed de