Ethics: The Human Imperfection of Greed

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An ongoing problem in the United States and other countries are issues dealing with ethics. Many philosophers throughout the centuries have created works and theories on ethics, among them Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Ethics may generally be defined as the study of morality (Cohen, p. 17). Aristotle on Nicomachean Ethics said Virtue… being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. (Cohen, p. 79) I feel that these ideas serve as the groundwork for Ethics in general but as society has progressed it was and is necessary to adapt different types of Ethics. I am going to focus particularly Rule Ethics in this essay. Two specific Philosophers who contributed to this branch of ethics are John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant.

John Stuart Mill’s theories about Utilitarianism can be described as; actions are morally justified or morally unjustified according to the amount of good and evil they can be expected to bring into the world by their performance (Cohen, 2000, p. 22). I agree with John Stuart Mill in his utilitarian approach to ethics in other topics but I do not feel it is the best solution in a business or financial environment. My reasoning for the statement above develops from Mill’s “greatest happiness principle” stating that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. (Mill, p.9) Although this interpretation does not necessarily mean that free enterpr...

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...es show that self-interest was perused in business but not goodwill. The Executives of these companies performed unethical behavior that deliberately harmed consumers. I believe the legal system should take into consideration deliberate ethics violations based around the Kantian model suggested previously. There are many more examples including the KeySpan Energy Corporation in which companies violate ethics but the Untied States does not currently have exact laws to punish that behavior. If laws were based around theories of Kant’s rationality of goodwill and the maxims of the categorical imperative I believe that some of these violations could be punished as such and no laws would need to be reviewed or rewritten. This would serve as a deterrent to future violations and stands to benefit society. In short, it is ones duty to conduct business ethical manner.

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