Beneath good and evil?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to think business ethics with the help of philosopherAlainBadiou, focusing onBadiou's critique of ethics and the concepts of ‘event’, ‘truth’ and especially ‘subject’. Based mainly on review articles,Iconstruct an understanding of business ethics (comprising corporate social responsibility and sustainability) and its history as a field of research. With the help of a framework developed from Badiou's work on ethics,Iconduct a metacritique of business ethics as being intolerant (exclusion of voices), nihilist (concerned with necessity and economics), reactive (to social movements in the 1960s, arguing that there has always been an ethics of business) and obscure (building upon the atemporal body of knowledge in ethics). Opposed to these tendencies, with the help of the constructiveBadiou,Iargue that business ethics should move towards the creation of faithful subjects possibly formed by ‘inexistent’ research in the field, as well as concerning itself with closely studying and identifying empirical cases of faithful subject formations and their deviations.

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