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TOWARDS A BUSINESS ETHICS, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 1996. (This book was written in collaboration with Liliana Delgado in the course of a research funded by Science and Technology, University of Buenos Aires.) Our aim was to write a book that would help thinking about the problems faced by organisations, not a list of procedures to solve them. Actually, the book is aimed at everybody involved in business, from a theoretical as well as from a practical point of view. It will also attract teachers of ethics, who will find in it new approaches, and novel standpoints. Inquisitive readers, too, who, like it or not, live in a world which is "colonised" by global economic and bureaucratic systems. Talk about morals is not uncommon in our days. In fact, it is suspiciously frequent. No need to go into philosophy, either; both the media and advertisers promote, in their own way, the reign of ethics. Current issues include moralising attitudes connected to medicine and medical technology, genetic engineering, computing and the Internet, ecology and the environment, education, as well the mass media and advertisers themselves. All this talk and painstaking to include ethics in any available discourse, incite suspicion and prompt Socratic irony. Finally, and as regards business ethics, is it a joke to try and discuss ethics in this field or is there an authentic social concern which goes beyond the dictum "business is business"? Isn’t it rather a fantasy in the line of Susan Bordo’s twilight zones, which cloud our sight? WHY DO I MISTRUST ALL THIS ETHICS, IN CASE SOMEBODY SHOULD ENQUIRE... We might presume that a return of ethics should have two aspects. A very practical one: searching for guidelines to apply in education in order to avoid indifference, apathy, anomia. And a theoretical one: the need for a negative ethics, which will keep up and not annul the tension between what is and what should be; will identify evil, if it cannot manage to set the boundaries for the good. An ethics that will pay more attention to dissent than to consent. Such consensus is obtained through external means that any politician or advertiser can get hold of. An ethics that will open up a path towards the infinity of others; will see truth not as a reflection but as a historical "origin" and will thus avoid a trivial cultural relativism. An ethics that is conscious of belonging to a particular time in history and a particular world; it will not fall into ethnocentric resignation but will not deny such ethnocentrism, either. It should face the irony of knowing that it cannot defend the contingency of its beliefs, although it must defend them in its conduct and attitudes. It should not state where we are heading or should be heading —the future is not what it used to be. Quite on the contrary, it should stand in the present, where it is much easier and efficient to point at what we dislike and what hurts.