This dissertation is a genealogy of business ethics, focusing mainly on the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s. Looking back from the 1930s, it asks: Where does business ethics come from? How did it come to be? What is it made out of? What are its social, cultural, and institutional lineages?

Chapter 1 clears the ground for the historical account (methodologically, semantically, and logically or conceptually). My genealogy of business ethics is a genealogy of morals in the public sphere, or of public moral normativity. By "public moral normativity" I mean that which is publicly regarded as morally acceptable and/or desirable in a society S at time t. By "genealogy" I mean a narrative about where a particular social thing comes from. In this chapter I also make the substantive historical claim that business ethics had six main lines of descent. However, this dissertation addresses only two of them—one in chapter 2 and the other in chapter 3.

Chapter 2 explores how business ethics figured in the establishment and early activities of university-based business schools. I argue that the establishment of business schools was represented and justified partly in moral terms. From a public moral normativity viewpoint, business ethics provided good answers to the questions of whether and why universities ought to offer business education, and what business the business schools were in. Further, I show what the young business schools did and tried to do to promote business ethics, including business ethics courses and series of lectures.

Chapter 3 explores the relationships between business ethics and business associations. Specifically, I examine the mutually-reinforcing emergence of a national business association and of the concept of business. As a result, "American business" became a distinct entity, social actor, and moral subject. In the early twentieth century, this new moral subject was accused of bad business ethics, most famously by the muckrakers. As a defense against the (perceived and/or real) effects of these accusations—public indignation and regulatory action—business associations resorted to business ethics.

Chapter 4 considers the scholarly and practical/political value of my genealogy of business ethics. It concludes by making a case for a sociological account of societal metaethics.