Abstract
Few would deny that some central questions in business ethics are normative. But there has been, and remains, much skepticism about the value of traditional philosophical approaches to answering these questions. I have three central aims in this chapter. The first is to defend traditional philosophical approaches to business ethics against the criticism that they are insufficiently practical. The second is to defend the view that the appropriate methodology for pursuing work in business ethics is largely continuous with the appropriate methodology in moral and political philosophy more broadly. And the third is to offer a brief characterization of how we should think about the substance of business ethics, in light of my arguments about its proper aims and methodology.