The origins of Polish business ethics—as this discipline is understood in Europe and the USA today—are closely linked to the democratisation of the Polish political system and the economic transformation of the 1990s, which involved the departure from a centrally controlled economy and the opening up to market forces. These were formative years for Polish business ethics. The moral aspects of this transformation inevitably became the topic of the day, but also, within academic reflection, ethical analyses of the very nature of the market economy, especially questions about the morality of capitalism, began to emerge. The post-communist transformation was also associated with the reform of management education, of which business ethics had long been an important component in Western business schools. Interest in these issues was an expression of the pro-European aspirations of Polish practitioners and theoreticians of management. This article recounts three decades of Polish business ethics, covering the 1990s and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This story is primarily about the people who were actively involved in promoting the new discipline and the institutions they created. However, at the end of this period they may have been surprised to witness the political turmoil associated with the rise of populist and anti-liberal tendencies in Polish politics. The question of whether ethical business can exist in a non-democratic environment therefore recurs. However, the answer seems simple (and it was already known at an early stage of the post-communist transition): without liberal democracy and the rule of law, ethical business standards will remain an impossible ideal.