2. • Why study business ethics?
– Why are you taking the courses that you do? Why are
you enrolled in school?
• Answers: required by major, hope to get a good job when
graduate, good job to make a lot of money, make a lot of
money to be happy.
• Do something as means (study) to an end (college
degree, a job, money, happiness)
• We work as a means to an end
– Work ever be an end, rather than only a means?
– What is , and what ought to be, the nature of work,
and what values are served by working?
– What are the responsibilities for business as a place
of work?
3. • Businesses: the place where we work.
– It produces goods and services, but providing
employment is the most important social function of
business.
– People who win the multimillion dollar lottery prices
claim they continue working on their present job.
• This goes against the common wisdom that we work only to
get paid.
• Work: very important part of our lives and
something we could easily would ,or could
abandon.
– Very idea of work: suggest drudgery and toil,
something to be avoided when possible.
– A necessary evil.
4. • Nature of work
– It can be exalting, uplifting, fulfilling and degrading, tedious,
trouble some
– In Genesis; work seen as a curse and punishment for original sin,
yet humans called forth to work the land, to subdue the earth,
to till and keep the garden.
– Aristotle: necessary for good life, yet also disparage because of
this necessity , and therefore “slavish nature”.
– Martin Luther, John Calvin and Benjamin Franklin:
acknowledged the drudgery of work, yet each emphasized how
this very toilsome nature can be put to work for a higher cause.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau: romantic view of self-reliant craftsman
developing human creativity was by a recognition that within
society mankind is everywhere in chains.
– Karl Marx: labor had the potential to express our very humanity
but, in model capitalist societies at least, labor is alienated from
this end
5. • The two side of this ambivalence raise distinct
questions for business ethics.
• Work can provide opportunities for valuable,
meaningful, and uplifting human activity
• Work can be dehumanizing, degrading, and
oppressive.
