This document is a combination of lecture notes and slides and manual, with back some exam questions that are asked. This is a course at the university, based on the textbook Business Ethics: a critical approach (Jones)
Ethics: systematic and critical reflection on morals and morality. Ethics is trying to reflect on the
former concepts. Ethics is questioning morals and morality. Ethics can never be about some
ideology or religious proposition. There is no room for dogma. It is critical about every value that
we face. It brings up everything we used to do and discusses it. It is an academic discipline
because it reflects in a systematic way.
Everything that has to do with religion, they go back to some kind of revelation. Revelation is
somebody that is telling us things that we have to except. Example: there is only one god. Ethics
say that that’s not a good starting point. It questions all this. When we do everything dogma says,
there is no ethics. Ethics questions everything.
Ethics is never something fixed. The nature of ethics is a very problematic communication. What is
ethics about? There are three concepts that concern ethics.
It’s singular: it’s about personal opinion that we’d like to have shared by others. It’s about
personality, your own way of living and you cannot hand it over to somebody else. The ethical
claim that rests upon our shoulders is a duty. It is difficult to communicate your problem to
someone else cause it might not be a problem for them. This means that every theory about
ethics is questionable. The ethical duty cannot be dealt with in theoretical terms and cannot be
generalized. Our ethical duty is never about ethical codes. Codes are made to escape the
problematic of the ethics. Ethics is about subjective knowledge. It’s about you as a singular
human being.
Is ethics relative? There is something absolute in ethics; something that we cannot question. As
human being there is a claim resting upon us. As human beings we have an ethical duty. It’s very
concrete. When it comes to behaving or acting ethical you can never say ‘I don’t care’. You can’t
just say that ethics are relative. We are human being as so far that we accept that there are ethical
claims upon us. Animals don’t have ethical duties, but human beings have the capacity of
reflecting about what we do and why we do something. As human beings we have a broken
relationship with the world or with our surroundings. We have the capacity of setting a step out
of that world and reflect about it. You can try to deny it, but even the fact that you’d deny that,
shows that you have a broken relationship with the world that surrounds us. The problem is that
you cannot talk about that duty in objective terms. It’s not about humanity in life, but it’s about
your own life, your own problems. You cannot just say ‘not killing is our duty’, what about helping
people die? That’s the disruptive character of ethics. There’s something absolute: answer the
answering.
The third concept that matters with ethics: infinity. It means that we have never fulfilled this duty
of ours. You can never really tell if you acted ethically or not. The claim is still there even if you
gave some money to a homeless man, etc. the claim is infinitely; it never stops. Because of that
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