Abstract
The purpose of this week’s assignment was to read three peer reviewed/scholarly journals and compare and contrast each author’s ethical perspective. The articles were: What is Business Ethics by Peter F. Drucker, 1981, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton Friedman, 1970 and The Relevance of Responsibility to Ethical Business Decisions by Patrick E. Murphy, 2010.

Ethical Perspectives of Friedman, Drucker and Murphy Peter F. Drucker is known as the man who invented management. Drucker wrote many books on management and influenced the way business and industry thinks about management. “Peter F. Drucker was a writer, professor, management consultant …show more content…

There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine” (Krugman, 2007). This article by Friedman is outdated and his theory is based on the only social responsibility a business has is to make as much money as possible while obeying the laws. In addition Friedman believes only individuals can have social responsibilities, not businesses. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom” (Friedman, p.1). Teaching in the Business Department at four year business university, I stress the importance of the three objectives of Business: • Survival, • Growth and the • Fulfillment of the business’ Social Responsibility.
Whenever these three objectives are achieved, the business will earn a profit. Reading