Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

DEFINITIONS OF ETHICS

Ethics is a branch of axiology which together with metaphysics, logic and epistemology constitutes philosophy. Ethics attempts to find out the nature of morality, and to define and distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Ethics is also called moral philosophy. Ethics according to Manuel G. Velasquez ‘is a study of moral standards whose explicit purpose is to determine as far as possible whether a given moral standard (or moral judgement based on that standard) is more or less correct’.¹ Many ethicists assert that there is always a right thing to do based on moral principle, while others subscribe to the broader view that the right thing to do depends on the situation. To many philosophers, ethics is just a ‘science ...