| This short account of the history of applied ethics in Australia includes a brief record of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics, acknowledgement of earlier accounts of applied ethics in Australia and reference to some of the events which have provided case studies for media and education. The timeline runs from 1980 to 2016, which is not to say that there was no interest in applied ethics before 1980 but recognises the first half of the 1980s as the birth of business ethics (De George, 2012; Grace & Cohen, 2010). The objective is not a definitive history but in some respects a chronicle, a record so that the timeline and events and perhaps personalities will not be lost, a record that might be a useful resource for those who seek to write a more definitive history, whether of the discipline, or some aspect of it or of some organisation or enterprise within it. It is written in the context of a call for papers about ethics in the global south and in the Southern hemisphere. Although the aim is not a history that reports every event, it is a history in the sense that ‘history means finding out by inquiry’ (Hancock, 1954), ‘to say how it really was’ in keeping with the discipline introduced into the writing of history by Ranke and his followers in the nineteenth century (Donnelly & Norton, 2011). In that approach to history, any writer of a history, even one that is short or incomplete, will ‘have to construct a frame of reference within which to discuss’ the available evidence, and that frame is ‘always determined by their own philosophical perspective and values’ (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1983). As this is a story mainly of business and professional ethics as distinct from bio-ethics, medical ethics and research ethics, it would seem appropriate to use a frame of reference widely used when presenting a history of business ethics to provide a core structure for this chapter. In that structure, developed by Richard De George (2012), the term ‘applied ethics’ has three distinct meanings – as a topic of academic scholarship, research and teaching; as the ethics of business and especially of the failures of business; as the name of a movement to build ethics into the structures of enterprises. |
