Contractarian Business Ethics: Credentials and Design Criteria

Contractarian business ethics (CBE) is a great vogue in the present study of organizational ethics. This article aims to assess CBE¿s credentials as a social contract argument. For this purpose, it embarks on a comparative analysis of the use of the social contract model in two earlier domains, i.e. political authority and social justice. Building on this comparison, it then develops four criteria for any future CBE. To apply the social contract model properly to the domain of organizational ethics, it should be: 1) self-disciplined, i.e. not aspire results beyond what the contract model can realistically establish; 2) argumentative, i.e. provide principles that are demonstrative results of the contractarian method; 3) task-directed, i.e. it should be clear what the social contract thought-experiment is intended to model; and 4) it should be domain-specific, i.e. the contractarian choice situation should be tailored to the defining problems of organizational ethics.