Business Ethics: Friedman V. Drucker V. Murphy

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to review three articles, each written by a well-known management experts. In that these experts are known to affect the opinion of many decision-makers, it is important to digest the material and determine how the authors’ views compare and contrast with one another. It is noted that business ethics are difficult to completely abstract in that some are matters of conscience while other ethics are actually matters of law. This paper begins with a short discussion of the authors and then proceeds with separate sections to compare and to contrast the authors viewpoints.

Authors

This paper discusses three particular articles by management writers: Milton Friedman, Peter F. Drucker, and Patrick E. Murphy. Friedman (1970) wrote an article in the New York Times newspaper. Later, Drucker (1981) wrote an article in The Public Interest. More recently, Murphy (2009) wrote an article in the Journal of Business Ethics. These articles demonstrate that there exist widely varying views and opinions of ethics as practiced in business.

Comparison

Each author considers business and society in what is essentially a nodal graph. Each node represents a entity, either an individual person or an aggregation of people such as a business or societal group. The links between the nodes represent relationships, responsibilities, or obligations. Further, the links are unidirectional like arrows pointing from one node directly to another node without reciprocity. Hence, a node can either be a source of action or the target with the tip of the joining arrow pointing to the target.

The source node: Regarding business ethics, Friedman clearly sees the source node as being “individual proprietors or corporate executives”. However, he points out that his discussion focuses on corporate executives rather than individual proprietors. This is exigent to his presentation because the executive is an “agent” working on the behalf of the business...