Lessons for Business from Bioethics

Three widely accepted principles - autonomy, beneficence and justice - provide a useful analytic framework for considering controversies and conflicts in bioethics. They provide a starting point from which consistent ethical analysis and comparison can begin. While justice is commonly discussed in the business ethics literature, the other 2 principles are not widely discussed. This paper investigates whether the principles of autonomy and beneficence provide a framework that is equally useful for framing issues in business ethics. It is argued that they do. First, the principle of autonomy, with its associated notions of informed consent, privacy, and self-mastery provides a consistent approach to the analysis of diverse issues that arise in business ethics. Second, it is argued that the relationships between a business and its stakeholders ground duties of beneficence. The principle of beneficence provides a framework for considering the issues that arise in these relationships.