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Business Ethics
Meaning

According to Oxford dictionary ‘Ethics’ means principles that control or influence a person’s behaviour
• professional/business/medical ethics
• To draw up a code of ethics
• He began to question the ethics of his position.

According to Wikipedia –Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that “involves systematizing ,
defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behaviour.

At its simplest ,ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their
lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral
philosophy.

Ethics covers the following dilemmas:

@ how to live a good life.

@our rights and responsibilities.
@the language of right and wrong.
@moral decisions-what is good and bad?
Origin of Ethics
There is no historical record of a human society in the period before it had any standards of right and wrong ,history cannot reveal the origins of morality.

• The term ethics is derived from the Greek word ‘Ethos’. Ethikos the Greek work from which ethics word is derived . Ethical philosophy began in fifth
century BCE,with the appearance Of Socrates,a secular prophet whose self appointed mission was to awaken the fellow men to the need for rational criticism of
their belief and practices. Other than Socrates the Greek philosopher Aristotle and Plato who written about ‘Ethics’.

• In ancient Middle East and Asia the first ethical precepts must have been passed down by word of mouth from parents and elders , but as societies learned to
use the written word, they began to set down their ethical beliefs.e,g

• Hebrew Bible (old Testament) account of God’s giving The Ten Commandments to Moses(flourished 14 th -13 century BCE)

• The dialogue Protagoras by Plato(428/427-348/347 BCE)

• In India ,Vedas ,ethics is an integral aspects of Philosophical and religious speculation about the nature of reality . These writings date from 1500 to 1200 BCE.It
is called the oldest literature of philosophical literature. Jainism , Buddhism are the extension of the great ethical philosophy of India.
Definition of Ethics

Kant’s Ethical theory

• An action has moral worth if it is done for the sake of Duty.
• An action is morally correct if its maxim can be willed as a Universal law.
• We should always treat humanity , whether in ourselves or other people ,as
an end in itself and never merely as means to an end .

19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and 

John Stuart Mill according to which an action (or type of action) is right if it
tends to promote happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to produce
unhappiness or pain—not just for the performer of the action but also for
everyone else affected by it.