“For Business Ethics” –is a book about business ethics, providing different perspectives. For the reader who is not into business ethics and does not even know what it is, this book would be a perfect solution. Authors of the book try to explain the “common sense” of business ethics not just by telling us what does the term mean, but by making us to think about ethical values in everyday together with examples. While reading the book, you start to understand that business, ethics and philosophy is not that easy as we used to think. They give us possibility to understand what business, ethics and business ethics is.

The authors talk critically and cynically about business ethics by posing the question: “for or against ethical business”.  The authors do not deny the possibility that everything we know as "good" and "bad" is relative. To find the answer for the main question – what business ethics is? – in the beginning of the book they put 6 main themes and problems:

1.       Foreclosing philosophy

2.       Foreclosing society

3.       Foreclosing ‘The ethical’

4.       Foreclosing the meaning of ‘ethics’

5.       Foreclosing politics

6.       Foreclosing the goal of ethics

Business ethics do philosophy, it is related to politics, and directly connected to society. In any situation there are good and bad sides, thinking about it - this is the ethics, in business it is the same. Business ethics has many different sides like there are a lot of different people. In the begging God gave us the possibility to choose and that is why we are free. But people usually want to be exemplary and try to make others good, by showing how good they are. “In most cultures, business has been seen to be a rather dirty and vulgar matter” – from this aspect business ethics was settled. People need business ethics because they do not trust business.

For the first time this book was published in 2005, but we still can clearly see the similarity between then and now.  The authors are challenging us to think: what is good and what is bad, why are people making decisions, why business is related to politics, can we always be right? Finding answers will be difficult, but at this time you will start to think about business ethics differently.

Summarized by Bozena Tiutceva, for Media Ethics course, 2014