Business Ethics Perspective

Significantly, whilst the social entrepreneur and corporate social entrepreneur are united in their quest to create social value: a business ethics perspective encourages us to ask the question for what end? Here business ethics is useful, as it uses intellectual frameworks to encourage us to think deeply about means and ends. For example, the idea of the CSE creating social value which benefits both the corporation and society is known as ‗enlightened self-interest‘. Alternatively, a deontological viewpoint frames acts of socially responsible behavior as driven by the individual’s sense of duty to society, which may be viewed in terms of altruism. Altruism is of course very difficult to support empirically, although there have been many studies of pro-social behavior and support for the notion of self-transcendent (other-oriented) personal values in social psychology.