Announcing a new special issue: Critical perspectives on business ethics

Abstract

We had started to hatch our ideas for this editorial quite a long time ago. In fact, we were in the middle of assembling the Sustainability Stories special issue [Vol 19(1) of 2025] at the time. The main idea that we had, was to use an editorial to announce a new special issue, which is precisely what we are doing. This started out under the rather outrageous running title of “Business Ethics: Putting Lipstick on a Pig? ” We had flitted between this obviously provocative question and the much more suitable-for-polite-company question: “Is it really possible for business to be ethical? ” Of course, both of these may seem like rather strange questions to ask: (a) in a field that has been characterised by fairly generalised optimism for at least a century (see, for example, Filene, 1922); and (b) in an editorial in a business ethics journal. Nonetheless, assuming that we have not reached Fukuyama’s (2020) “End of History”, it is never too late to question that in which one might have invested one's faith. To frame in a little more detail what we have in mind for this special issue, in effect these questions define what could be a rather fundamental debate if the opposing factions were forced together into some sort of dialectical relation.