F.A.Q.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do you accept guest postings? No. Never. Please do not offer to “share” your content (or your infographic) with my readers.

2. Do you accept paid advertisements? No.

3. Are you available as a guest speaker? Quite possibly. A lot of the topics I blog about are also topics I’ve written about in my more scholarly work. So feel free to contact me. You can find out more about my consulting services here: Chris MacDonald, Ethics Consultant.

4. How should I cite your blog entries? If you’re a scholar or student and want to cite something I’ve written in my blog, please feel free! Here’s an example. If you wanted to cite, say this blog entry, your citation should look like this:

MacDonald, Chris. “SUV’s & Child Safety,” The Business Ethics Blog. http://www.businessethicsblog.com (Posted January 4, 2006)

Or, you could use the full URL, to point directly at the specific entry you’re citing, like this:

MacDonald, Chris. “SUV’s & Child Safety,” The Business Ethics Blog. https://thebusinessethicsblog.wordpress.com/2006/01/04/suvs-child-safety/ (Posted January 4, 2006)

5. Why are your blog entries so anti-business? I’m not anti-business myself, so I hope my blog isn’t anti-business. But business ethics is about right & wrong in corporate behaviour, good and bad ethical decision-making in the corporate world; and the corporate behaviour and decisions that make thenews is generally bad behaviour and bad decisions. So, I end up discussing — hopefully in a fair & even-handed way — lots of stories that are critical of corporations.

6. Why are you so pro-business? I’m not particularly pro-business, so I hope my blog isn’t overtly pro-business either. More often than not, I highlight the non-obvious badness of certain corporate behaviour. But often, the badness is pretty blatant, and so I don’t need to harp on it. So I try to “complexify” the situation, and provide people with the basis for something other than the obvious conclusion. Also, sometimes I pull my punches — in a way that makes me seem soft on business — just because I don’t know enough about a given situation to be fully critical. I’m not an investigative journalist. I can only spend maybe an hour on a given blog posting, so I can’t always get a real feel for the situation. In most cases, I don’t have time to do the kind of checking that would make me confident in some particular allegation. And where I lack facts, I’m not going to blast a company with both barrels. (Of course, some behaviour is so disreputable, and so well-documented, that I do get pretty cranky…)

7. What’s the definition of “business ethics”? Look here for a definition: Define Business Ethics.