Virtue Ethics in Business Research Group
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Virtue Ethics in Business (VEiB) is a Research Group based at the University of Navarra, with researchers and scholars all over the world.
"We are inquiring not in order to know what excellence is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use"
(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103b)
Why Virtue Ethics?
Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. The deontological school (rights-based) focuses exclusively on codes and compliance, while the consequentialist school only considers the results of a cost-benefit analysis, in terms of utility, of our actions.
We take virtue to be the key ethical concept in business and management.Virtue ethics not only takes into account exceptionless norms, like deontological rights, but also pays attention to the effects of our actions, as in consequentialist reasoning. More importantly, virtue ethics understands these exceptionless norms and consequences within the context of human flourishing as a common good. In this sense, the purpose of a firm is not only to produce goods and services efficiently, but to provide a community in which human beings acquire and practice the virtues as well.