| As the business corporations exert an increasing impact on society, the key issue that influences its development now presents itself as how to raise business morals. Grounded on the concept of business moral capital, the present paper unfolds the laws of its development, and advances two effective approaches to raise business morals.Although theories on business moral capital were not proposed until recent years, the relevant ideas have long been around in the human history. As early as in the Patriarchal Society, people who were literally engaged in laboring came up with the original idea of moral capital. The free market society then witnessed a burgeoning of the theories and actual practice of business moral capital. When it comes to the society where the nation interferes with economy, the concept of business moral capital becomes involved in all the conducts of the corporations.The value of business moral capital lies in the transfer of morals required by the society to significant financial capital needed by a corporation, which in turn will urge the corporation to raise morals in a more active way. Yet, moral capital cannot be transferred to financial capital unless a certain amount of profits can be secured for the corporation, which, however, does not necessarily take place. To coordinate the economic profits of a corporation with its moral conducts, some norms of economic restraint from the society are required, that is, rules of temperance in tandem with the requirement of business morals. When the profits secured with temperate conducts outweigh that of intemperate conducts, the transfer of moral capital to actual financial capital is successfully achieved.To boost the development of a society, corporations are bound to assume moral duties from several aspects. To be specific, corporations should protect workers'rights for security at work, rights for payment, and more advanced rights for human needs. In business dealings with the consumers, corporations should comply with rules of transaction, that is, mutual benefits, freedom, and equality. Besides, corporations are supposed to take on morality for ecology, taxing, and charity. However, whether a corporation cares for the fulfillment of all those moral duties depends on whether the duties can be transferred to financial capital for the corporation and whether the safeguards for rights in the society are able to enforce the social temperance on the corporation.There are two major approaches to build business morals and to raise business moral capital. The first is to strengthen the social temperance enforced upon the corporations to secure the transfer of moral duties to actual moral capital. The second is to set up moral communities in the corporations to improve their abilities to accumulate more moral capital. |
