To some extent, this issue overlaps with the previous two in that it partly concerns the degree to which business ethics is divided between practitioners of an empirically-minded social science background with expertise in techniques such as questionnaires and inventories as against those of a normatively-minded philosophic background with expertise in ethical theory. What it centrally concerns, however, is not academic background but what business ethics teaching and research is about: its subject matter. And here, it can be argued, the choice is between describing what does in fact go in business with respect to morality and prescribing what should go on.

At one level this is clearly a bogus distinction. For even the most empirically-minded subjects within business studies engages in prescription as well as description: be it marketing telling businesses what they should do to increase sales, or human resource management telling them what they should do to increase worker productivity, or whatever. The difference, it can be suggested, is that while those prescriptions concern the attainment of strictly empirical objectives, those of business ethics do not. Rather, they concern what can be seen as a very different category constituted by ethical objectives: outcomes to do with moral right and wrong, good and bad in a strictly moral sense. At this point, the notion of a dichotomy between description and prescription rests on that of a fact-value distinction: the claim that value judgments cannot be justified on any kind of factual basis. This is, of course, a highly controversial claim and, very arguably, not one that can be seriously maintained given it means accepting that there is nothing to objectively distinguish right from wrong even in relation to genocide, slavery, torturing for pleasure, and so on. Consequently, unless the very extreme step of accepting an absolute distinction between fact and value is taken, then there is no theoretical barrier to the combining of description with prescription of a specifically ethical sort in relation to business or any other activity.

Whether combined or, as some might suggest, necessarily separated, this still leaves issues about the purpose (issue 6), recipients (issue 7), and scope (issue 8) of the descriptions and prescriptions produced.

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