This comment is offered in response to Hansen's A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement. Five issues arising from Hansen's purification and refinement efforts are addressed. These include the issues of parsimony, predictive validity, collinearity, reliability, and what we see as a confusion between normative and positive theory.

Many researchers in the field of business ethics have attempted to develop methods to determine and evaluate the ethics of a variety of different classes of people, including students, professionals, and mixed samples of students and professionals. Unfortunately, most of these studies were disjunctive, simply adding confusion to an already unfocused area of research. However, Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990), have changed this trend by attempting to quantify the various ethical philosophies into a multi-dimensional scale of business ethics. This paper (...) examines the background of the Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990) scale — including the authors'' findings, empirically tests the scale, and concludes that the scale needs further refinement. A promising result is a model with four dimensions: a broadbased ethical judgment dimension, a deontological judgment dimension, a teleological judgment dimension, and a social contract dimension. (shrink)

A national sample of 362 respondents assessed the ethical predisposition of the American marketplace by calculating a consumer ethics index. The results indicate that the population is quite intolerant of perceived ethical abuses. The situations where consumers are ambivalent tend to be those where the seller suffers little or no economic harm from the consumer's action. Younger, more educated, and higher income consumers appear more accepting of these transgressions. The results provided the basis for developing a four-group taxonomy of consumers (...) which retailers should find insightful in assessing potential consumer actions in a variety of situations. (shrink)

The recent accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations have helped to fuel a massive loss of confidence in the integrity of American business and have contributed to a very sharp decline in the U.S. stock market. Inasmuch as these events have brought ethical questions about business to the forefront in the media and public consciousness as never before, they are of signal importance for the field of business ethics. I offer some observations and conjectures about the bearing of (...) the recent scandals on the literature on business ethics. I defend the following contentions: 1. Recent events reveal serious weaknesses of the stakeholder theory about the social responsibilities of business which lacks prohibitions against fraud and deception. This is a glaring deficiency of standard versions of the stakeholder theory, but it is easily remedied by adding explicit prohibitions against fraud and deception. In addition, recent events highlight the stakeholder theory's very naive and unrealistic hopes and expectations for business executives as moral arbiters and agents of social improvement. 2. Recent events do not constitute an objection to the shareholder theory about the social responsibilities of business, however, these events make evident the implausibility of strong versions of the invisible hand theory. 3. Schemes of payment and reward often create perverse incentives for individuals to engage in unethical conduct. 4. Both the shareholder theory and the stakeholder theory need to add a constraint that requires executives to respect the professional obligations of employees. (shrink)

This comment is offered in response to Hansen's "A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement". Five issues arising from Hansen's purification and refinement efforts are addressed. These include the issues of parsimony, predictive validity, collinearity, reliability, and what we see as a confusion between normative and positive theory.