The Role Of Virtue Ethics In The Analysis Of Business Practice

A ROLE FOR VIRTUE ETHICS IN THE ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS PRACTICE Daryl Koehn Abstract: This article explores differences in the ways in which utilitarian, deontological and virtue/aretic ethics treat of act, outcome, and agent. 1 argue that virtue ethics offers important and distinctive insights into business practice, insights overlooked by utilitarian and deontological ethics. ' X ' h e r e has been a recent resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, particularly in A the contrihution of such ethics to understanding, evaluating and guiding business practice. While I concur with those who think that virtue ethics does have much to offer in this respect,' I think that some of the recent discussion of virtue ethics has been less clear than it can and should be. In this paper, I will try to shed some light on these confusions and then close with a few thoughts on the distinctive contribution virtue ethics can make to business ethics. Let me begin by separating several key topics or issues that often arise when virtue ethics are discussed in a business context: 1) What IS an ethic of virtue, and how, if at all, does it differ from the other ethics offered by deontologists, utilitarians. Stoics, etc? 2) What IS the relation among these various ethics? In particular, does virtue ethics ground these ethics or vice versa? Or are the ethics equally fundamental and thus best viewed as complements to one another? 3) If each ethic offers discrete and distinctive insights into what constitutes moral human behavior, what contributions does an ethic of virtue offer** While distinct, these three questions are clearly interrelated in a number of ways. For example, what insights each ethic offers depends upon the tenets of that ethic. However, since my space here is limited and since the second question of the foundational status of the various ethics is quite complex, I will limit my comments to the first and