Abstract

Business ethics is the second area of applied ethics to emerge as an active research area; medical ethics was the first. This dissertation examines some of the major problems in this area by applying a version of the social contract theory. The first essay sets out the application of Rousseauian political theory to ethics. The second offers an ontology of bribery, then applies this theory to show that many acts currently called bribes are not really bribes at all. The third is a detailed examination of A. Z. Carr's theory that business is a game. An existentialist framework is sketched to make sense of this claim. The fourth provides a classification of whistleblowing and related classes, then offers necessary conditions for morally requiring a person to blow the whistle