Center for Ethics and Business

'Center for Ethics and Business

1. Philosophical ethics

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of moral

virtue and evaluates human actions. Philosophical ethics differs

from legal, religious, cultural and personal approaches to ethics by

seeking to conduct the study of morality through a rational, secular

outlook that is grounded in notions of human happiness or

well-being. A major advantage of a philosophical approach to ethics

is that it avoids the authoritarian basis of law and religion as

well as the subjectivity, arbitrariness and irrationality that may

characterize cultural or totally personal moral views. (Although

some thinkers differentiate between "ethics," "morals," "ethical"

and "moral," this discussion will use them synonymously.)

Generally speaking, there are two traditions in modern philosophical

ethics regarding how to determine the ethical character of actions.

One argues that actions have no intrinsic ethical character but

acquire their moral status from the consequences that flow from

them. The other tradition claims that actions are inherently right

or wrong, e.g, lying, cheating, stealing. The former is called a

teleological approach to ethics, the latter, deontological.

2. Teleological (results oriented) ethics

A teleological outlook is particularly appealing because it takes a

pragmatic, common-sense, even unphilosophical approach to ethics.

Simply put, teleological thinkers claim that the moral character of

actions depends on the simple, practical matter of the extent to

which actions actually help or hurt people. Actions that produce

more benefits than harm are "right"; those that don't are "wrong."

This outlook is best represented by Utilitarianism, a school of

thought originated by the British thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

and refined by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

a. Jeremy Bentham: quantifying pleasure

Strongly influenced by the empiricism of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham

aimed at developing a "moral science" that was more rational,

objective and quantitative than other ways of separating right from

wrong. Bentham particularly argued against the ascetic religious

traditions of eighteenth-century England that held up suffering and

sacrifice as models of virtue.

Bentham begins with what he takes as the self-evident observations

that 1) pleasure and pain govern our lives, and 2) the former makes

life happier, while the latter makes it worse. These two concepts

anchor Bentham's ethical outlook. "Nature has placed mankind," he

writes in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and

Legislation, "under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain

and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do,

as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the

standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and

effects, are fastened to their throne."

From this insight about pleasure and pain, Bentham develops as his

ethical touchstone the notion of "utility": "that property in any

object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure,

good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same

thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the

happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose

interest is considered: if that party be the community in general,

then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual,

then the happiness of that individual." Utilitarianism therefore

contends that something is morally good to the extent that it

produces a greater balance of pleasure over pain for the largest

number of people involved, or, as it is popularly described, "the

greatest good of the greatest number." Pleasure is Bentham's

ultimate standard of morality because "the greatest happiness of all