Business Ethics, Step by Step

This technical note is intended to serve as an introductory text to the Business Ethics course taught by Prof. Ricardo Calleja. Based on class discussion, the note presents the various attitudes that often occur among those taking a course on business ethics: distrustful, skeptical, pragmatic, compliant or reformist. Faced with these attitudes, the reader is invited to go one step further and see business ethics not as a burden, a set of demands or a marketing concept, but as a dimension of business activity that appeals individually to the executive. Ethics is about the optimal goal of human life and how to achieve it. For this reason, business ethics examines the purpose of business, and how it relates to human life on the whole.