In the last seven years, several corporate scandals have shaken public confidence in Chilean corporations. Considering this scenario and the fact that business ethics is an under-researched area in Chile, this study set out to examine one corporate genre, namely, codes of ethics. The codes of ethics from eight Chilean companies were analyzed. This sample offers both typicality and systematic variety as the eight texts have been produced by large-sized companies, five of which have been involved in media scandals. Each sentence was analyzed in order to determine what function it serves. The functions that exhibit the highest occurrence frequency in the corpus are educational (35.8% of sentences) and regulatory (33.9%). The other functions which emerge from the data are self-promotional (8.8%), inspirational (8.5%), commissive (7.8%), and aspirational (4.9%). The predominance of educational and regulatory functions evidences a deontological, compliance-based approach, while the striking salience of the self-promotional function, which ranks third, suggests the strong sense of pride which, according to some Chilean scholars, characterizes the Chilean entrepreneurial class. A critical analysis of the quantitative results and the language used in these documents points to some rhetorical flaws, which may render these texts ineffective.