Philosophy of Business: Imposing the Moral Ideals vs. Following the Moral Rules

Abstract

In the paper I analyze the expectations of Russian society towards the business community. My hypothesis is that the society tends to impose moral ideals of charity as an obligatory form of action. And one could only encourage moral ideals and shouldn’t demand them. Following the moral ideals unlike moral rules are not supposed to be obligatory. In the paper I also critically reconstruct possible arguments justifying external society pressure on the businessmen. I outline two main arguments. First one ‘the criminal argument’ is based on the idea that the source of businessman’s wealth is wicked and therefore a businessman owes the society more than others. The second argument ‘the argument of new normativity’ is based on the premises that, even if the business is ethically flawless, additional moral rules for businessmen are created by the institutional fact of doing business, The scrutiny of the arguments for additional moral requirements for businessmen leads me to the conclusion that suggestive power of those arguments is grounded in the fact of reflecting society’s desires, and not in some sort of rational foundations.