This paper is a set of comments on papers from the Third Shanghai International Conference on Business Ethics, October 29–30, 2010, Shanghai, China. I would like to thank the organizers of this conference for the opportunity to share some of my observations on some of the papers presented. As a result of some serious health problems, I could not make the conference and engage in the discussions. However, I am glad to be able to make some comments on a subset (...) of the papers that the adjudication committee thought should go into this collection. Some excellent papers were not included in the collection because they did not fit the scope of the Asian Journal of Business Ethics . So nothing in my comments should be regarded as any kind of comment on papers not mentioned here. I hope I can add some value to the good work already displayed in these papers. My comments are presented in the order in which I read the papers. (shrink)

Business ethics should include illicit businesses as targets of investigation. For, though such businesses violate human rights they have been largely ignored by business ethicists. It is time to surmount this indifference in view of recent international efforts to define illicit businesses for regulatory purposes. Standing in the way, however, is a meta-ethical question as to whether any business can be declared unqualifiedly immoral. In support of an affirmative answer I address a number of counter-indications by comparing approaches to organized (...) crime and to corporate crime, comparing the ethical critique of businesses studied in business ethics and those socially banned, and comparing the business ethics assumption as to businesses’ ethicality to societal ethical neutrality regarding war-related businesses. My conclusion: to help advance respect for human rights, business ethicists should apply their expertise to the task of defining illicit businesses. (shrink)