The Five Books of Moses contain 613 direct commandments concerning proper conduct including what one must do and must not do in all situations. More than one hundred concern business and economics (Kahaner, 2003, p. xvii). The root “halach” means “go” implying the path, the way, the direction. There is a wrong way and the correct way. Halacha serves as a guide to business activities.
Published in Chapter:
Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom: Using the Torah, Bible, and Qur’an in Ethics Education
Susan S. Case (Case Western Reserve University, USA) and J. Goosby Smith (Pepperdine University, USA)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-510-6.ch003
Abstract
This chapter explores how accumulated wisdom from the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Torah, Talmud, Bible, and Qur’an, provide many common codes for ethical behavior in business. Religiously derived ethics are relevant to management education because they form a source of our earliest ethical education, even for individuals unaffiliated with organized religion. When religious tension is increasing, such commonality can guide development of integrity within diverse groups of management students to confront and ethically resolve many moral challenges in the workplace. After examining similarities in these religions’ conceptualization of marketplace integrity, the chapter compares religiously derived ethical behavior along the following dimensions: workplace ethics of employers and employees; mutual responsibility and dignity of work; environmental ethics and stewardship; ethics of buying selling, and usury; and social justice and social responsibility. The chapter concludes with implications, presenting ways management educators can provide contemporary applications of this traditional wisdom.