Möglichkeiten und Grenzen normativer Unternehmensethik

Ethical questions have gained increasing importance for companies in recent years. However, there is a perceived societal gap between the communicated ethical claims of many companies and the actual business practices, for example, regarding wage and location policies. This paper demonstrates that the understanding of ethics has been shaped very differently throughout history. The same applies to the still young field of business ethics, which is presented in this work through the formal-normative approaches of Steinmann, Ulrich, and Homann, and analyzed in terms of its possibilities and limitations. The paper shows that the described gap can be characterized as a discrepancy between societal and economic rationality. However, this discrepancy cannot be resolved by questioning the fundamental functions of the market economy, nor by equating ethics with economics.