Ateneo de Zamboanga University

School of Liberal Arts

Philosophy Department
Business Ethics (Supplementary Lecture Notes)

“An unexamined life is not worth living”

Socrates

Preliminary Notions:

A. Etymological: The word ethics comes from the Greek word “ethos” ,meaning : custom, a
habitual way of acting character, a meaning that the Latin terms “mos” , “moris” also
connote. Among the Greeks , “ethics” meant what concerns human conduct/human
action.
B. Descriptive: Largely a concern of cultural anthropologists and sociologists. Its task is to
describe how some person, members of a culture or society address all sorts of moral
issues, what customs they have, and so, how they are accustomed to behave.
C. Met-ethics: Concerns itself with the meanings of moral terms: like good and bad, right
and wrong, duties and rights, etc. Hence the concern is with the understanding of the
use of these terms, their logical forms and the objects to which they refer. Sometimes
the concern of meta-ethicist is even more fundamental: What is the possibility of moral
philosophy.
D. Normative: Ethics is normative, not in the way that logic is, namely. With regard to the
correctness of our thinking, but with regard to the goodness of our living, the right
orientation of our existence. It is a practical science, not simply because it treats human
action, but also because it aims at guiding this. Moralists are not content to describe
human conduct: they intend to judge and rectify it. They propose rules and give
warning, they provide counsels and issue precepts, so as to make clear to men the path
of right living and to help them walk upon it.
E. Normative can be understood in two ways:
1. Teleological (Telos) End, Goal, Fulfillment, Realization. It puts more emphasis on
morality as the attainment of man’s end, fulfillment and happiness. One can have
in mind the art of living, the technique for acquiring happiness. The terms good
and bad has the teleological connotation of that which is in conformity or not
with the goal.Therefore good and bad signify fulfillment completion, perfection
or not.
2. Deontological: (Deon)They put more stress on the aspect of moral duty and
obligation. It can be understood as the science which is concerned what is
worthy of a Human Being. To liver rightly will not then be the equivalent of: to
live happily, but: to live as one should. Thus, right and wrong has a deontological
implications which refer to morally binding and obligatory. Therefore, the right
action is that which we ought to do or ought to have done, the wrong action that
which we ought to refrain from or ought to have refrained from doing.
F. The need to study Ethics:
1. Ethics makes clear to us why one act is better than the other.
2. Ethics contributes an orderly social life by providing humanity some basis for
agreement, understanding some principles or rules of procedure.
3. Moral conduct and ethical system both of the past and of the present, must be
intelligibly appraised and criticized.
4. Ethics seeks to point out to men the true values of life.
G. Assumptions of Ethics:
1. Man is a Rational Being
2. Man as Free
H. The Objects of Ethics:
 1. Physical: The doer of the act.
2. Non Physical: The act done by doer. Human acts- are said to be the formal
objects of ethics because they have moral value. Acts of man: Involuntary
natural acts, Voluntary natural acts, Amoral and Neutral Acts.
I. Classification of Human Acts
1. A. Moral or Ethical Acts: These are human acts that observe or conforms to the
standards or norms of morality.
B. Immoral or unethical Acts: These are human acts that violate or deviate from
the standards or norms of morality.
2. Human Will: Moral acts stem from the human will that controls or influences the
internal and external actions of man. The will stirs a person to act or hampers
him from acting. It colors the motives for his engaging or disengaging in a
certain action. Living against all odds, hoping in he midst of hopelessness,
finding meaning in great loss, selfless sacrifice for others-these are just few
cases that demonstrate the power of the will to motivate the human soul for
goodness, hope and determination or the reverse. It is this art of the soul that
affects the freedom and reasoning of the individual The will is the agency of
choice. The will may prompt reason to overpower passion or on the other
extreme, arouse passion and allow it to overrun reason. As such, the will is a
potential force for both good and evil. The strength and weakness of the will
determines the strength and weakness of a person’s character. Thus, the will
affects one’s action, and that therefore, it must be brought closer to reason and
to the proper sense of morality and goodness. It is morality which directs the will
to its proper choice through the instruction of the moral sense which is borne out
of human experience.

J. ELEMENTS of Moral Dimension

1. Action: It is the moving of oneself and taking concrete means in view of the goal
or end, which is not yet but which somehow ought to be. It requires man to take
the means and to set into motion a course of events, starting from himself and
moving into the world, toward what ought to be , toward some future state of
being, which eventually includes himself and the world. Tis moral end or goal
needs to be made m0ore precise, but in any case, morality is primarily man
taking up action, doing something, realizing something which ought to be.
2. Freedom: Morality requires man to act , to realize what he must be and what his
very being ought to be. Morality therefore, presupposes freedom of action.
Freedom of choiceof the means, Freedom of choice of intermediate goals,
Freedom to follow or not man’s ultimate end, the freedom to determine onself to
be truly he is.
3. Judgment: Action can be judge as good or bad; right or wrong, which can be
classified as the norms of morality, which refers to some ideal vision of man, an
ideal stage or perfection of man, which serves as the ultimate goal and norm. In
this light, the good seems to be the kind of ultimate norm, the measure of the
ultimate meaning and worth of man’s existence. ( Norms: Technical, societal,
Aesthetic, Ethical/Moral)
4. Universality: The law of universality: “Act only on that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it should become a universal law, that is: Action is
moral in so far as one can say that any man in one’s place should act in the
same way. Morality therefore, of its very nature, is infinitely open and inclusive
of any and every human person, placing man in the context of the community of
all fellow human beings. For this reason, equality and justice are the direct
corollaries of moral experience.
5. Obligation: The state of being bound or required to do or not to do, a categorical
imperative. In this sense, the good is universally binding and obligatory on man
so that his being is an “ought-to-be” and an “ought to act” in view of his very
being. That is the “good”.
K. Components of Moral Acts:
1. Intention: or motive of the act
2. The means of the act
 3. The end
L. Morality and Religious Belief: ”Morally right” means “commanded by God,” and “morally
wrong means “forbidden by God”
1. Advantages of the Theory:
a. Religious belief provides meaning to morality
b. Settles once and for all the problem of subjectivity/objectivity of
ethics: Ethics is not merely a matter of personal feelings or social
customs.
c. Suggests an answer to the perennial question: Why bother about
morality? Because the day of final reckoning you will be held
accountable.
2. Difficulties with the Theory: The theory may seems to lead to impious result.
M. Self Determination as Foundation Of Ethics: The source and ground of all ethics is that
the capacity of man for self-determination, the capacity to go beyond what he is as he
finds himself at the start, the capacity to deliberate, to make plans, to make decisions,
to act, to adopt a way of life: that power of causality in man called “moral-will”.
Question for moral will: “Why be good, when everyone else is not?”

1. Cynicism: The moral endeavor is considered as mere illusion o sheer duplicity.

2. Stoic Affirmiation of moral project despite all adversities: deny the reality of mral
evil itself and think of it as reducible to manageable human proprtions eventually
to be overcome by human progress.

MORALITY/ETHICS
 “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.”
(Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.)
 “the study or science of morals” (Chambers Encyclopedic English Dictionary)
 “Ethics” used synonymously with “morality” but it is not quite the same with morality.
 Ethics is a branch of philosophy (moral philosophy) that examines the moral standards
of an individual or society, and asking how these standards apply to our lives and
whether these are reasonable or unreasonable.
 “Morality” refers to the standards that an individual or group has about what is right and
wrong conduct, good and evil, and the values embedded, fostered or pursued in the act.
 “Moral standards include the norms we have about the kinds of actions we believe are
morally right and wrong as well as the values we place on the kinds of objects we
believe are morally good and morally bad.” (Velasquez, Business Ethics, p. 9)

 VALUES
 Values are qualities that are of worth, of importance.
 “Moral values can usually be expressed as statements describing objects or features of
objects that have worth, such as ‘Honesty is good,” “Injustice is bad.” (Velasquez, p. 9)
 Max Scheler: values are objects of our intentional feeling.
 “values are caught, not taught”
 Question: are values objective or subjective? Whether value reposes in the object or is
a matter of how we feel towards it. Scheler: values are objective, a priori.

 GOOD AND EVIL

 Good and evil in ethics are to be distinguished from physical/natural good or evil,
because they presuppose freedom and responsibility.
 Scheler: good and evil are moral values. Positive: good. Negative: evil.

 FREEDOM
 Freedom and responsibility are correlatives.
 Two meanings of freedom and responsibility:
 1. Free choice (horizontal freedom) and accountability
  2. Fundamental option (vertical freedom) and response-ability.

 FREEDOM OF CHOICE
 I am the source of my action.
 I am free from external coercion
 Choice of goods

 RESPONSIBILITY
 Because I am the source of my action, I am accountable or answerable for it.
 This does not mean though that my action is a responsible one.
 FUNDAMENTAL OPTION
 Refers to the direction of my choices
 Towards values that form a hierarchy
 Option of love: higher values. Option of egoism: lower values
 Freedom from internal constraints.

 RESPONSE-ABILITY
 The ability to give a response that meet the objective demands of the situation
 Answers the call of higher values.
 I become a responsible person.

Worksheet for Moral Deliberation

Minimum Requirement of Morality

Identifying and setting up the Ethical Problem

What is the ethical problem? The issue – it helps to be able to state or define,
succinctly, the ethical issue involved in the case and to make sure that this is not confused with
other elements of the problem. (Per-haps the ethical problem can be stated in one or two
sentences very much like a thesis statement that defines the problem to be tackled.)

What are the relevant facts?

What immediate facts have the most bearing on the ethical decision that must be made in
this case? Include any potential economic, social, or political pressures.

What are the relevant facts?

What immediate facts have the most bearing on the ethical decision that must be made in
this case? Include any potential economic, social, or political pressures.

It is important to identify the stake-holders who will be affected by the ethical decision to be
made. It will also help to identify the correspond-ing obligations that one has toward the various
stakeholders.

What are the available options?

It is important to list down at least three. As Aristotle remarks, there are at least two, and these
two often represent the extremes. No-thing is ever either black or white; sometimes one is
forced to think in terms of a compro-mise, even if that compromise doesn’t exactly conform to
your personal notion of what is the right thing to do. It is at this stage that reason struggles to
transcend what we feel.

What benefits and what harms will each option produce, and which alternative will lead to the
best overall consequence? (Utilitarianism)
● What moral rights do the affected parties have, and which option best respects those rights?
(Kant)
● Which course of action advances the common good?
● Which decision enables me to be and act in ways that develop my highest potential as a
person? (Virtue)
● Which option treats everyone the same, except where there is a morally justifiable reason not
to, and does not show favoritism or discrimination? (Justice and Fairness)
Determine the most appropriate action
 On the basis of the evaluation done on the various options, we must determine the best
course of action – the moral thing to do. Ethicists claim that this is the most difficult part
of the process of moral decision-making. It requires courage – especially when reason
suggests one way and what we feel another way.

2nd, perhaps we can ask the following questions:

 What are the best and worse-case scenarios if I choose this particular option?
 Can I honestly live with myself if I make this decision?
 Will I be able to defend this decision to that claimant who has lost the most or been harmed
the most?

Double-checking the Decision

We are still on the way to the full flowering of love. (Richard M. Gula, SS, Moral Discernment
(New York: Paulist Press, 1997)

1) Moral judgments must be backed by good reasons: We must avoid making judgments on
the basis of feelings alone. "Morality is, first and foremost, a matter of consulting reason: the
morally right thing to do is determined by what there are the best reasons for doing." How do
we evaluate arguments then? First, we should get our facts straight. Second, moral
theories/principles should be brought into play. In other words, these function to justify (not
rationalize) our actions and decisions.

Requirement of Impartiality. (Requirement of justice?) Each individual's interests are equally

important, i.e., there are no "privileged" people.

ETHICAL PRINCIPLES

UTILITARIANISM

• Conceived in the 19th century by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill,
• the most popular in business: the cost-benefit analysis in business is a form of this theory.
• basis for the rightness of an action: consequences or effect on all persons affected (including the
agent).

An action is right if and only if the sum total benefits produced by that act is greater than the sum
total benefits produced by any other act the agent could have performed in its place.

Two Main Limitations

1. In its traditional form, it is difficult to use when dealing with values that are difficult and perhaps
impossible to measure quantitatively.

2. It ignores the questions of rights (individual entitlements to freedom of choice and to well being) and
justice (how benefits and burdens are distributed among people).

Rule utilitarianism (vs. case utilitarianism) tries to answer this by proposing the evaluation of rules instead
of cases.
RIGHTS

• the individual’s entitlement to something.

• In contrast to legal rights, moral or human rights are derived from a system of moral standards
that specify that all human beings are permitted, empowered to do something, or entitled to have
something done for them.

The basis of moral rights is Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which, for our purposes, has
two formulations:

First formulation:

“I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a
universal law.”

An action is morally right for a person in a certain situation if, and only if, the person’s reason for
carrying out the action is a reason that he or she would be willing to have every person act on, in
any similar situation.

Two criteria, therefore, are necessary for determining moral right and wrong:

• UNIVERSALIZABILITY

• REVERSIBILITY

(similar to the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would want them do unto you.)

Second Formulation:

“Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of
any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

An action is morally right for a person, if, and only if, in performing the action, the person does
not use others merely as a means for advancing his or her own interest, but also both respects
and develops their capacity to choose freely for themselves.

Justice and Fairness

“Justice consists…in treating equals equally and unequals unequally, and in giving each person
his due.”

a. Compensatory Justice: concerns the just way in compensating someone for a past injustice or what
he/she lost when wronged by others.
b. Retributive justice: consists in the just imposition of punishment and penalties on those who do
wrong. This is related to procedural justice, referring to fair decision procedures, practices, agreements.
c. Distributive Justice: involves the fair distribution of benefits and burdens.
When issues concerning the common good are at stake, distributive justice comes into play. The
principle of distributive justice simply states:

Individuals who are similar in all respects relevant to the kind of treatment in question should be
given similar benefits and burdens, even if they are dissimilar in other irrelevant respects; and
individuals who are dissimilar in a relevant respect ought to be treated dissimilarly, in proportion
to their dissimilarity.

4. VIRTUE ETHICS

Virtues are dispositions, attitudes, habits that form the character of a person, developing his or her
highest potentials. Aristotle held that virtues are habits that enable a person to act in accordance with
reason, and acting in accordance with reason is choosing the mean between the two extremes, the
extreme of excess and the extreme of lack.

An action is morally right if in carrying out the action the agent exercises, exhibits, or develops a
morally virtuous character, and it is morally wrong to the extent that by carrying out the action the
agent exercises, exhibits, or develops a morally vicious character.

Virtue ethics then determines the rightness or wrongness of an action “by examining the kind of
character the action tends to produce or the kind of a character that tends to produce the action.”

5. CARE

One criticism of Kohlberg comes from Carol Gilligan, a psychologist who studied the moral
development of women. For Gilligan, the moral development for women is marked by progress towards
more adequate ways of caring.

(Most ethicists recently have pointed out the ethics of caring is not only for women but also for men.)

An ethics of care emphasizes two moral demands:

a. We should preserve and nurture those concrete and valuable relationships we have with specific
persons who have become part of our lives and have formed us as we are.

b. We should care for those with whom we are concretely related by attending to their particular needs,
values, desires, well-being as seen from their own personal perspective, and by responding to these
needs, values, desires, well-being, especially of those who are vulnerable and dependent on our care.

Two important points:

1. An ethics of care should encompass larger systems of relationship leading to a “communitarian

ethic”.

2. An ethics of care provides a corrective to other ethical principles that emphasize impartiality and
universality.

In Summary, when making a moral decision, ask the following questions:

1. Does the action maximize social benefits and minimize social injuries?

2. Is the action consistent with the moral rights of those affected?

3. Will the action bring just distribution of benefits and burdens?

4. What kind of person will one become if one makes this decision?

5. Does the action exhibit care for the well being of those who are closely related to or dependent
on oneself?

“Watch your thoughts, they become words.

Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actios, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character, they beconme your destiny.”

ANONYMOUS
BUSINESS ETHICS

Moral Case:

You have just been hired by a consulting firm. It is a good pos-ition that will give financial
security to your family. Your first assignment is to assess bids for a study that your client needs
done. The bids were all due by 3:00 P.M. At 3:30 your boss calls you into office. He slips one
of the submitted bids into an envelope and asks you to run it over to one of the firms that you
thought was going to bid on the project but had not yet done so. You are told to wait while the
agent at this firm looks at the bid in the envelope and formulates his own bid to return to you.
You suspect that you are being asked to cooperate in a scheme that is showing favor to your
boss’s friend. But as a new employee, you want to be seen as a team player. You don’t want
to jeopardize your job or the financial security of your family, yet it seems wrong to let a
competing firm look at someone else’s bid. What ought you to do? (Richard M. Gula, SS, Moral
Discernment (Paulist Press, 1997), 41.)

CASE ANALYSIS

Larry Javier looked at the complicated income tax form for sole proprietors. How he
wished that he was back to preparing the individual income tax return, which he used to file as
an employee with fixed income. With the gross income tax and his employers’ religious with-
holding of correct taxes from his salary, the filing of his income tax was then straight-forward.

Now Larry was sole proprietor of the business he inherited from his father. Mr. Victorio Javier
founded a medium-sized handcrafted jewelry shop in the town of Meycauayan. Through some
forty years of hard work and honest dealing with his customers, Mang Victorio had built up the
business which now employed 20 craftsmen, many of them with decades of service. Mang
Victorio was known as a very charitable man, and was one of the first persons the mayor, the
barangay chairman and parish priest would run to whenever there was a project to be funded.

Mang Victorio’s sudden death forced Larry to take on this job, and keep the business alive to
support the family and maintain employment. The young Javier had some training as a
craftsman mostly from watching and assisting his father, but his work experience had largely
been in sales with multinationals.

Larry, as sole proprietor, applied what he had learned in his previous employment,
watching costs carefully, instituting modern quality measures and keeping books meticulously.
He was now going over his new books. The more he looked at the tax form and his financial
papers, the more he realized that he could not afford to pay income taxes. He was winning
more customers, sales were up, but the highly competitive industry was keeping margins down.

He saw that one of the big drains on his operating income was the donations that he
continued to give to his town and barrio. He was afraid that he will have to start turning down
many requests for donations, thereby displeasing some of the old friends of his father. Fearful
of compromising his family’s image, he consulted his father’s friend, Mr. Joey Guevara.

Mr. Guevara confided, “Larry, you’re taking the government too seriously. The secret of
the trade is to understate your tax returns. You should be more like your father and all the
others. He knew how to deal with the collectors.”

Larry recalled the time when the Bureau of Internal Revenue raided their town three
years ago. The victims were mostly the small sweatshops whose books and business papers, if
present, were not as neatly organized. The BIR raid led to the closing of a number of these
shops, with their tools and equipment confiscated until they settled their deficiencies.

Then it dawned on Larry. His father paid “taxes” not really to the BIR but instead to the local
officials in the form of donations. He tried to recall what these donations went into. Indeed
they went into worthwhile projects that really did the community good, like parks, basketball
courts, and scholarships.

Larry, like many others in the community, did not exactly admire the national government. In
fact, he had always perceived it as unresponsive to the needs of his community which was
suffering from lack of potable water supply and terrible traffic. He remembered reading
somewhere that only 65% of taxes really went to legitimate ends.

“Exactly who is cheating whom?” Larry pondered, realizing that he could not pay both the
legitimate tax to BIR and the “tax” to the community without going out of business.

Business Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that examines the moral standards of an individual or

society, and asking how these standards apply to our lives and whether these are
reasonable or unreasonable.
The application of ordinary human moral and ethical considerations in a business
setting.
“Application”: Like medical ethics, environmental ethics, business ethics is applied
ethics.
Business: any or all-economic transactions between individuals, between individuals
and profit-making organizations, and between profit-making organizations and other
such organizations.
“Moral (Latin) and ethical (Greek) considerations”: How people ought to behave (to each
other). Values of honesty, fairness, loyalty, justice, respect, etc.
“Morality” refers to the standards that an individual or group has about what is right and
wrong conduct, good and evil, and the values embedded, fostered or pursued in the act.
Ethics is the “discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a
society.”
Ethics “asks how these standards apply to our lives and whether these standards are
reasonable or unreasonable—that is, whether they are supported by good reasons or
poor ones.”

Implications

Two questions arise from this definition:

1. What makes a standard moral?
 2. What makes a moral standard reasonable?

In (1) we enter into questions of individual and social responsibility.

In (2) we enter into moral reasoning (since ethics is part of philosophy, and philosophy uses
reasons or reflection.

Moral Standards

What distinguishes moral standards from amoral standards?

1. Moral standards deal with matters that can seriously injure or benefit human beings.
E.g. theft, rape, fraud, slander, murder.
2. The validity of moral standards rests on the adequacy of reasons to support and
justify them, not on decisions of majority or authoritative bodies. E.g. that one ought to
tell the truth does not depend on how many people will vote on it nor on the legislature.
One indication of justification is the consensus of participants in communication.
(Habermas)
3. Moral standards are to be preferred to other values, including self-interest. E.g.
honesty is to be preferred than cheating, although cheating can make me graduate.
4. Moral standards are based on impartial considerations. Another way of expressing
this is ‘universalizable’ or taking the point of view of an ‘ideal observer.’ Still, this
impartiality must be balanced with partiality towards those we have a special relationship
(family and friends) and the poor and the disabled.
5. Moral standards are associated with special emotions such as ‘guilt,’ ‘shame,’
‘remorse,’ ‘praise,’ ‘indignation’.
What is common to all five characteristics? None other than society taken in its broadest
sense, or in philosophical terms, the ‘other.’
In other words, individual responsibility cannot be taken in isolation from social
responsibility.

Individual and Social Responsibility

In the first place, we acquire our individual moral standards from society: the family,
friends, school, church, associations, and media.
As we grow up, experience, learning and intellectual development may lead us to revise
these standards, adopt new ones, or reinforce existing ones in order to meet moral
challenges and dilemmas of adult life.
Maturity can be characterized by the expansion of the horizon of one’s responsibility,
from the ego to the other, or what one is originally responsible-to becomes what one is
responsible-for. e.g. my being responsible to my parents becomes, when I have my own
family, what I am responsible-for, i.e. parenthood.
Morality is not just a question of avoiding evil (individual) but of pro-actively doing good
(social).
Justice is not just avoiding doing harm to the other person but of responding to the
objective demands of the situation, to the call of a higher value.
Morality is not just a question of avoiding evil (individual) but of pro-actively doing good
(social).
Justice is not just avoiding doing harm to the other person but of responding to the
objective demands of the situation, to the call of a higher value.
I am not solely responsible to myself or to my family, but also to others, to the
community. I cannot just be moral at home and not in the workplace.
The social and the individual interpenetrate.
At times, the individual and the social come in conflict, and there is need to apply moral
reasoning.

Moral Reasoning

Moral reasoning is the reasoning process by which human behaviors, policies,

institutions are judged to be in accordance with or in violation of moral standards.
Moral reasoning involves two essential components:
 1. Moral standards that requires, prohibits, values, or condemns, and
2. The factual evidence or information that a particular person, behavior, policy or
institution has the kind of features that the moral standard requires, prohibits, values or
condemns.
In argument form, (1) forms the major premise, (2) the second premise, and the conclusion is
the moral judgment.

Example:

(1) A firm is unjust if it does not treat women equal to men.

(2) In Starbank, men are given preference for promotion than women.

______________________

Therefore, Starbank’s policy is unjust.

To evaluate the adequacy of moral reasoning, various criteria are used by ethicians:
1. Moral reasoning must be logical, that is, the premises must be true and the reasoning
valid.
2. The factual evidence cited must be accurate, relevant, and complete.
3. The moral standards involved in the person’s moral reasoning must be consistent.
Consistency means that the moral standards involved in the reasoning are consistent
with each other and with other beliefs the person holds. Consistency also means that
one is willing to accept the consequences of applying one’s moral standards to all
persons in similar circumstances.

Summary:
“Business ethics is a specialized study of moral right and wrong. It concentrates on moral
standards as they apply particularly to business policies, institutions and behavior.” (Velasquez,
p. 13).

 Refers to clear standards and norms that help employees to distinguish right from wrong
behavior at work.
 It has to do with the extent to which a person’s behavior measures up to such standards
such Law, organizational policies, professional and trade association codes, popular
expectations regarding fairness and rightness, plus an individual’s internalized moral
standards.
 The sub-field of Ethics which examines and apply moral standards within the context of
finance; commerce; production, distribution, and sale of goods and services and other
business activities.
 Business Ethics vs Ethics in Business
 Ethics maybe generalized from context to context.
 There is no separation between ethics and business.
 “Business and commerce work well only if people take seriously there obligations and in
particular their sense of justice”.
 “The marketplace breaks down unless it can presuppose the virtue of industry, without
which goods will not be produced; and virtues of honesty and integrity, without which
their free and fair exchange cannot take place.

Business and Organization

 Business: any organization whose objective is to provide goods and services for profit.
 Business people are those who participate in planning, organizing, or directing the work
of business.
 Organization is a group of people working together to achieve a common purpose.