Improving Business Ethics: The President's Lonely Task
John I. Reynolds is a Professor of Management and Business Analysis and Research at Texas A&M University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton, an M.B.A. from Harvard and a D.B.A. from Harvard. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Business Horizons, Logistics Spectrum and Business Logistics. There has never been a shortage of calls for the ethical improvement of business decisions. Few couch the issue, in the apocalyptic terms of Robert L. Heilbroner, as a &dquo;long-run challenge to a business civilization,&dquo;’ but no one who has thought deeply about the problem treats it lightly. Some think of it as a need for &dquo;social responsibility&dquo; in business; others are more concerned with &dquo;morality&dquo; or &dquo;justice&dquo; in an absolute sense. Few people, in or out of the ranks of management, are completely satisfied with the status quo. But there is a great deal of controversy over how to effect the needed changes. .
The Social Responsibility of Business: A Dissent
BUTLER D. SHAFFER is Associate Professor in the Law and Society program of the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He holds the J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School. His articles have appeared in Labor Law Journal, University of Miami Law Review, and Creighton Law Review. One of the more widely-touted concepts of recent years, enjoying support both from within and without the busi-
Between identity and difference: Three ways of reading Nishida's non-dualism
The philosophy of Nishida KitarŌ offers the reader today not only a paradigm for a comparative philosophy, but also a methodological framework to construct a Buddhist philosophy. The key and, at the same time, the obstacle to his philosophy is the concept of the "self-identity of the absolute contradiction." This conceptual cornerstone of Nishida's philosophy is as controversial among scholars today as it is central to his philosophy. Critics, such as Tanabe Hajime and Takahashi Satomi, argue that Nishida's philosophy privileges the principle of identity over that of difference and falls into a monism; his supporters, most of all Nishitani Keiji and Ueda Shizuteru, to the contrary, claim that it comprises the key to philosophical non-dualism. In general, I am convinced that even his "self-identity of the absolute contradiction," if it is read carefully within the context of Nishida's philosophy, will render a paradigm that falls neither into a logical contradiction nor into a monism but that provides the foundation for a non-dualist philosophy. To this end, I will reread it first in the context of Nishida's overall project and, then, on the background of Nishida's debates with his critics.