Business Ethics Between Orthodoxy and Foundational Critique: Thoughts on a Taxonomy

The embedded position of the economy in the societal frame of modernity demands a comprehensive reflection on the normativity that is inherent in all economic activity but very rarely systematically conceptualised. Although multi-disciplinary socio-economics is fundamentally open to decidedly normative disciplines such as economic philosophy and economic ethics, the latter remains marginal to its canon. One reason for this may be that economic ethics is itself a heterogeneous discipline, whose schools adopt widely differing stances towards mainstream economics. A clarification of these positions can contribute to generating a fruitful discourse between socio-economics and economic ethics and to fostering a dialogue between the two on questions of common interest. In a first step, a taxonomy of epistemological, ontological, normative and methodological dimensions is developed and used to systemise various schools of economic ethics. This forms the basis for a discussion of the positions these schools take towards neo-classical mainstream economics and of their compatibility with socio-economics.