Stakeholder Theory as a link between ethics and business

There has always been a relationship, though very often implicit, between ethics and business: only very few scholars or practitioners do not openly recognize that business behavior must comply not only with law, but also with ethical constraints.  Friedman (1970) considers maximizing profits for shareholders as the only duty of managers but asks for ethical customs to be respected as well. The stakeholder view asks for more, affirming that it is based on the idea of an intrinsic, strict and synergic connection between ethics and business and, consequently, the relations between ethics and business are essential questions for this approach. This paper examines the most interesting works of Authors, who try to connect ethics with business, and presents their contributions and limitations. All these studies both contribute to a better understanding of the ethics/strategy connections in the stakeholder view and are useful for achieving better managerial practices. In the last decade, research has shown that stakeholders are not only concerned with a firm's ethical approach to them, but also with its treatment of other stakeholders. Freeman and colleagues (2020) outlined five principles of stakeholder theory, which have further strengthened the foundation of the theory. In conclusion, the paper affirms that an ingenuous and rough win-win view cannot logically be acceptable, but creative and responsible management could lead to a sort of asymptotic and synergic convergence between ethics and competitive strategy.