People need to hold businesses more accountable for unethical behavior, a Loyola University Chicago professor told about 40 people Tuesday night at Sheil Catholic Center.

Charles Murdock, who teaches at Loyola’s Law School, gave a lecture titled, “Business Ethics: Whatever Happened to Telling the Truth?” The lecture is part of an ongoing education series on business ethics organized by the education committee at Sheil.

Before the event, Murdock told The Daily he wanted to give people “a better understanding of just what a corporation is and why regulation is necessary.” During the interactive dialogue, Murdock focused on the relationship between corporations and the government.

“Government is admittedly a poor control mechanism, but it is the only means of control available,” he said. “The market does not punish corrupt behavior, so we need rules and regulation.”

Murdock, who has published a number of papers dealing with ethical issues in the business world, opened the lecture by asking people what they thought of the phrase “business ethics.” A scattering of people responded immediately, calling it an “oxymoron.”

Although the audience responded negatively toward business ethics, Murdock highlighted the importance of corporations.

“Business men and women are the mediators of social justice in this country,” Murdock said. “Who generates jobs? Who makes health care possible?”

According to Murdock, corporations do not have their own values because they exist only as legal entities. Therefore it is up to the people running the corporations to put morality into the corporate sphere.

“Values need to be imputed upon the corporation,” Murdock said. “These values can only come from the people who make up the corporation.”

Because businesses do not have an internalized sense of morality, Murdock said corporations are driven solely by the profit motive. Without moral inhibitions, Murdock said, companies often engage in unethical activities, such as Enron Corp.’s debt hiding practices and Volvo’s misleading advertisements.

As a result the public needs to hold businesses to ethical standards, Murdock said. With corporations focusing on profit, he said people must recognize that “we can’t rely on business to act out of the goodness of its heart, because that’s antithetical to the purpose of business.”

Audience members, mostly senior citizens and graduate students, said they appreciated Murdock’s enthusiasm for this issue.

“Thanks to Mr. Murdock’s vibrancy,” said Jim Rooney, a retired local resident, “the audience was able to communicate through him to this issue at hand.”