My concluding remarks are necessarily brief. A complete answer to this ques-
tion would require writing a book laying out an entire theory of business
ethics. Instead, I am content with stating what I take to be a guiding principle
of the professional ethic of business and offering a few thoughts on the business
virtues this principle would seem to entail.

Governments want to encourage business. Consequently, they extend rights
and privileges of incorporation. Their aim is not that a few people get rich.
Rather, they foster business in the hope that these incorporated businesses will
provide goods and services of a sort to genuinely enrich consumers' lives. The
end of legitimate business, then, is to provide products whose enriching value
consumers will recognize and which they will purchase, thereby leading to
profits for the company. If this is the end of business, then businesspeople must
be concerned about both justice and integrity.

By "justice," I mean the developed ability of an agent to consistently
conceive of him or herself as part of a whole community with shared goals. As
Plato (trans. 1968) succinctly put it, there must be some justice even among
thieves. A good human life is not possible unless agents take care to evaluate
the benefits and harms their actions are likely to produce for others with whom
they live and to avoid those that are destructive of shared life. At a minimum,
concern for justice entails that businesses do not continue to produce products
when they have significant data that these products are killing or maiming
consumers. Although these products may be legal and although Friedman's
ethic would permit their production, business professionalism as just defined
would not because the products do not enrich consumers' lives. To put the
same point slightly differently, ethical and just businesspeople regularly ask
themselves whether their proposed actions take too much good for themselves
and leave too much harm for others. Business people are not insensitive to this
question of justice. As one of my bosses used to say, "It is fair for the
action/plan to be 'you win, I win' or 'you lose, I lose,' but the plan should not
be 'I win, you lose' or vice versa."

Of course, plans that fairly distribute benefits and harms do not simply
materialize out of thin air. Such plans are devised by agents who take it on
themselves to think about the possible effects of their actions on others. This
means ethical businesspeople must have integrity. It would be naive to believe
that businesses actually always achieve a fair distribution in the eyes of all
affected parties. There are unjust people in the community who will grumble
about whatever others do. Still, it remains within the power of businesspeople
to do their best to identify the necessary conditions for shared life in a commu-
nity of human beings. Acting with integrity means both seeking and taking
guidance from shared deliberations with others, deliberations that have been
focused on the question: In the particular case at hand, are we taking too much
good for ourselves and too little harm? If this question is asked and explored
with other affected parties in good faith -- and I take "good faith" to include
being willing to consider what insights relevant laws might have to offer in the
case at hand -- conversants will begin to flesh out who is in fact affected and
in what way, and the odds will increase that all parties to a particular transac-
tion will be winners.

With practice in deliberating, students, colleagues, and businesspeople do

get better at arriving at rich, full descriptions of the actions they are proposing
to perform. They learn to bring the many relevant features of the situation to
the fore and to assign these features an appropriate weight. Although there are
some problems with using cases in business ethics classes, I generally support
giving students the opportunity to identify relevant features of situation akin
to those commonly occurring within business. We professors sometimes talk
too much. We need, I think, to give students more scope to try to analyze cases,
even if it means they flounder around for awhile. Given time to actually work
on a case in a group setting and to analyze it from the perspective of justice,
students collectively almost always come up with the points those of us more
practiced in deliberation would make.

This integrity/justice-based approach comes with no guarantee that the
deliberator will not overlook an affected party or some evil. But integrity-based
practice is surely better than legalism insofar as it recognizes that agents do not
always have a lawyer at hand to explain what law applies to the case; that the
law itself may overlook certain unhappy effects; that the law is often confusing,
unclear, or conflicting; that, like the equitable judge, agents must consider the
particulars of the case at hand; and last, that what the law permits may still not
be right. The demand to practice with integrity finally throws us back on our
collective selves and makes us ask a variant of the Rodney King question:
What will it take for us all to live together?

I reiterate that finally that is the ethical question, a fact which, paradoxi-
cally, even Friedman (1993) tacitly recognized. Presumably, the reason why he
does not want people to disregard the rule of law is because he, too, under-
stands that communal life is possible if and only if citizens understand and
accept the need for mutual and enforceable constraints upon their behavior,
constraints that prevent people from taking too many benefits and too few
harms for themselves. I am proposing that ethical life requires that these
constraints be brought into view and be fully explored, not merely be presup-
posed as unfortunate background noise to the main business of maximizing
profits. To treat the whole question of justice as an annoying side issue is
tantamount to asserting that "my business is my castle and I should be able to
do whatever I want within it." While I, like Professor Glendon, have had many
students initially adopt this stance, I concur with her that this absolutist stance
is childish. Or, to return to my earlier assertion, I assert that it is both naive
and dangerous. Although we may pretend that our businesses and our homes
are our castles, the fact remains that there are many things we are not morally
or legally permitted to do within them, for example, murder our parents, eat
our siblings, embezzle funds. Justice is the source of these limits, and it is on
justice that mature ethical individuals of integrity will want to focus.

Our castles are not impregnable; their walls have long since been scaled by
our fellow citizens. We live among them, they among us. It is time for us to
abandon the fiction that our businesses are our castles and that we are entitled

within the law to do whatever it takes to maximize profits. It is time to get on
with the hard business of trying to live with integrity.