Legal and ethical aspects of business with a view to the issue of language

The legal scholar and critical theorist Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder applied a unique interdisciplinary approach to the philosophy of law which uses linguistically driven Lacanian psychoanalysis, more precisely the theory of four discourses, as well as critical theories about the relationship of ideology and critique, to examine values, subjective roles and tendencies in scholarship which in jurisprudence correspond to the four discourses: the master's, hysteric's, university's and the analyst's. Through this approach, she investigates, among other issues, the relationship of morality with positive law and policy. Our thesis in this paper is that we can analogously apply Schroeder's perspective to business and economics, announcing potential innovations in psychoanalytically and linguistically informed interdisciplinary studies in the philosophy of business. Besides the most relevant subjective roles, we look at how this approach applies to some of the most prominent theories on the social responsibility of businesses. Towards the end, we address the language of marketing in advertising and other forms of promotion to see how our novel interdisciplinary approach may lead to improvements in consumer advocacy and much more effective moral criticisms of marketing policies.