Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 4, 1993

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting

Taking Ethics Seriously
The Competitive Advantage of Intrinsic Morality

The central thesis of this paper is that intrinsic morality, defined as morality which is embedded in company policy, solves many of the internal and external problems faced by business firms in the contemporary global economy. Conversely, strategic morality, defined as morality employed as a business policy, undermines morality in principle and may not be effective in practice. Thus, intrinsic morality bestows competitive advantage on firms.