Business ethics’ can be problematisted in a number of ways. The challenge to
business ethics postulated in this chapter entails a questioning of received opinionregarding the temporal, geographical and intellectual predicates on which it isfounded as an academic discpline and offered as a putative mode of engagementwith the world. An examination of mainstream texts on business ethics suggest that,taken as a discipline, it emerged around the middle of the last century in the UnitedStates of America (Aasland 2009) and draws on a variety of moral and ethicalphilosophical positions all of which can trace their origins to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment interpretations of classical schools (Parker 1998, Parker et al. 2005).Academic business ethics thus draws, predominantly, from one or more forms of deontological, utilitarian/consequentialist or virtue ethics (taken singularly or incombination). These ethical positions all assume the self as the location for anethical standpoint, or moral considerations. In contrast, we want to outline an
alternative position, based on Buddhist ethics, developing the question: ‘What wouldan ethical position entail that paradoxically cannot be located with the self?