Ranken on Disharmony and Business Ethics

ABSTRACT  This article is a response to Nani Ranken's paper 'Morality in business: disharmony and its consequences' ( Journal of Applied Philosophy , Vol. 4, p. 41). There she attacked the analogy sometimes made between businesses and persons, and concluded that businesses cannot be regarded as moral agents. Her thesis relies centrally on a very strict notion of a person's 'true good'. By exploring and expanding the concepts of 'true good' and 'moral agency' we are able to recover a sense in which businesses are indeed members of the moral community. Moreover, admitting businesses to the moral community also provides a working framework to examine the claim that what is good for business is in harmony with the dictates of morality.