The financial crisis has created a window of opportunity for both business and business schools to re-imagine how they might engrain ethics into the DNA of their activities so as to make business, and the world that business affects, better. The real journey begins when we actively engage, as live issues, the presuppositions about markets, economic models, and human nature that are foundational to prevailing beliefs about business. And for those who teach business ethics, it begins when we stop fighting for legitimacy and start affecting business in the positive ways.

Tell someone that you teach "business ethics," and you know what they say: "Isn't that an oxymoron - you know, like jumbo shrimp?" Or, "I didn't know business had any ethics." Or, "Must be a short course." Recently, we even got, "That's a pretty theoretical course, isn't it?" And this is a joke that travels: we've heard these kinds of responses in many countries and cultures. So, what does it mean to teach "business ethics"? And has it changed in the age of financial crisis, burst bubbles, and Bernie Madoff?

Business and commerce, and their connections to ethical thinking, are as old as civilization. However, according to Richard De George, business ethics, as an academic discipline, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, a group of scholars, primarily in the US Catholic universities, began to study business from the standpoint of ethical theory. In 1974 the discipline's first academic conference in this country was held at the University of Kansas. In 1980 these scholars formed the Society for Business Ethics, after which two academic journals emerged: The Journal of Business Ethics in 1982 and Business Ethics Quarterly in 1991. By the mid-1980s, courses, textbooks, casebooks, and organizations had all proliferated.

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