Business and Professional Ethics Journal

Volume 33, Issue 2/3, Summer 2014

Debates and Reasoning in Business and Professional Ethics
An Appreciation of Steve Williams

I am grateful to the Editors of for the opportunity to respond to the address given by Steve Williams at the Vincentian Conference of 2013, and published in the preceding pages. Mr. Williams takes the 2008 crisis of Western capitalism as his focus and offers at least two distinct narratives: in the first of these he outlines his experience of an extensive and complex professional, commercial world in . In a more extensive, second theme he offers some constructive suggestions as a means to recovering from this cataclysm and moving away those characteristics which he identifies as somehow causal. I will interpretively retrace Mr. Williams’s insights of the recent financial crisis. I will also comment on the challenges he outlines towards a resolution of this crisis. I draw on selected business and professional ethics positions, along with my personal experience of management practice and the pedagogy of business ethics in Western Management Schools. I delimit this appreciation of market capitalism as the systemic dominant social paradigm, the status quo.