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PAM Articles 
Integrity as the Ethical Basis of Business
DON G. SCHLEY
PAM, Vol. 7 No. 4,
(2002)
The ethics of business in modern Western civilization have devolved
into treating issues ad hoc, with respect to practical issues only. The deeper,
meta-ethical considerations, that is, not whether this or that act is ethical or
not, but what constitutes the ethical basis of our decision-making in the first
place, have been lost. In fact, the ethical basis of business is integrity, an
ethical aspect that unites both private morality and public and professional
ethics. Unfortunately, the modern drive for specialization and
compartmentalization in business as well as in the other aspects of our
common lives militates against living life on the basis of integrity.
