**Foundation of the Principles of Business Ethics**

The Classical Philosophies and their Implication on Business

**Aristotle**
All or Nothing [#](#f61aca)
**Moral Education**
A question of high importance in any investigation of ethics is how we
can teach people to be good. Aristotle is quite clear that he does not think virtue
that can be thought in a class room or by means of an argument
**Implications to business**
Aristotle concludes that the role of the leader is to creat the
environment in which all members of an organization can realize their own
potential.
What form of social contract would allow all our members to
develop their full potential in order that they may each make their greatest
contribution to the good of the whole?
Am i behaving in a virtous way?
How would i want to be treated if i were a mamber of this
organization?
**Virtue and Happiness **
The word happiness in the ethics is a translation of a greek term
"eudaimonia", which carry connotations of success and fullfilment. For aristotle,
this happiness is our highest goal.
**Socrates**
The Gad-fly at the marketplace [#](#64f1aa)
**Socrates thought to the Entrepeuneurs**
The socratic method is a way of thinking that allows individuals to
define their own purpose of learning and explored it purpose through open-minded
questioning of what they hold to be true.
**Dare to Disagree**
Socrates insisted on a right to think for ourselves. To often, he
warned, humans sleep walk through life, simply going along with the crowd. Does
your organization encourage independent thinkers and people who follow there
conscience.
**Plato**
The Philosopher-king [#](#c86c09)
**Education for the Health of the State**
In both the republic and the laws, Plato identifies education as one of
the most important aspect of a bealthy state. [#](#caf3b0) [#](#7d3117)
**The Theory of Forms**
Represents Plato's attempts to cultivate our capacity for abstract
thought. Philosophy was relatively new in Plato's day, and it completed with
methology, tragedy, and epic poetry as the primary means for which peolpe could
make sense of their place in the world [#](#93790e)
**Jeremy Bentham & John Stewart**
Utilitarinism
**Utilitarinism **
Revolves around the the concept of "the end justifies the means." It
beleives that outcomes as a result of an action has a greater value compared to the
latter.

**Immanuel Kant**
Duty based ethics
**The Third Maxim**
Everyone should, as a memeber of an ideal kingdom, were he or she is
both the ruler and subject at the same tim
**the Second Maxim**
A person should be treated as an end and not the means to acheie aan
end
**the First Maxim**
 An action can only be considered as a ethically correct if it can be
accepted or made into a universal law
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) is a towering figure in ancient greek philosophy, making
contribution to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics,
politics, agriculture, medicine, dance, theater
*"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of himan
existence"*
Plato (427-347 BCE) is one of the world's best known and most widely read and
studied philosophers. He was the student of socrates and the teacher of aristotle,
and he wrote in the middle of the 4th century BCE in ancient Greece.
Plato apparemtly considered most of his fellow athenians to be hoplessly corupt,
easily inflamed by hollow rhetoric and seduce by easy pleasures
"*The unexamined life is not woth living*"
*"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people
will find a way around the laws"*
Socrates (469-399 BCE) is ine of the few individuals whom one could say have shaped
the cultural and intellectual development of the world that, without him, history
would be proufoundly different
Plato thinks that a child's education is the last thing that should be left to
chance or parental whim since the young mind is so easily molded.

It deferentiates the abstract world of thought fromthe world of the senses, where
art and mythology operate.
*"act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law"*
*"The end justifies the means"*
He is one of the most influential philisophers in the history of western
philosophy. His contributions to methaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics
have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that follwed him
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