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Ethics Of Business


Act-utilitarianism holds that each case should be judged separately in terms of which possible action would maximise happiness; this means that there are no rules to follow, but the theory seems to provide a decision-procedure to act upon in that one acts upon a principle of justice. However, as a system of moral analysis, Utilitarianism has a number of difficulties. One of the major problems is the fact that it is extremely difficult to measure happiness, and if it is not possible to decide which of several available actions produces the most happiness, it must not be possible to decide which action is the right one. Also a particular action generating a high degree of happiness may have consequences that have the opposite effect. Can it be morally right to have a completely innocent and well person killed if two seriously ill people could be saved by an organ transplantation? Is an action always and incontrovertibly right because it gives greatest happiness to the greatest number of people? In addition to this it has the property of universalisality in that the right action will be right for everyone. Also, Utilitarianism fails to measure the intensity of given sides to an issue, and therefore, limits the ability to judge true happiness among members of society. .
             Virtue ethics is a very different approach to the others and central to Aristotle's work. It does not primarily concentrate on the right action as such; the right action according to virtue ethicists is the one that the virtuous agent would do. Virtue ethics takes the central feature of morality to be the virtuous character, and the account of what the virtues are as the basis of the theory. Cicero elaborated these notions, and applied them to certain business contexts in a long letter to his son "On Duties" (De Officiis). He attempts to address the very practical question of what we ought to do when what is "right" and what is "advantageous or profitable" conflict with each other.


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