Demuijnck, Geert2019-09-252019-09-252010-02-182008http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/173864This paper is based on a ten year experience as an external ‘expert’ in the ethics committee of the French retailer company Auchan.1 Auchan is a multinational company, established in 12 countries, but the paper focuses of the home branch of the company. The aim of the paper is not so much to evaluate the whole process of different decisions that were made and implemented in order to make the company meet high ethical standards, but rather to focus on three issues and on how they relate to each other. (1) the shift from a communitarian Christian set of values to a broader secular framework of basic principles, (2) the gap between standard philosophical reflections and the way in which business people in a retailing company cope with issues that seem ethically troublesome, and (3) a typology of the different levels of responsibility that we can reasonably attribute to retailers according to the kind of problem at stake. The three issues together illustrate how a company which took the business ethics question head-on got step by step into a quite astonishing ongoing collective learning process.engWith permission of the license/copyright holderChristian ethicsbusiness ethicsEconomic ethicsBusiness ethicsPreprint