The history of ethics can be traced to the BC years where around the 6th Century BC,

Pythagoras ethics and Orphism – a similar set of religious beliefs and practices were
founded in Greece. In the 5th Century BC, Socrates held his own views regarding ethics. ‘To
know the good is to do the good.’ By this, he meant that no man knowingly acts against his
own interest. Socrates believed that no man could consciously do wrong if that person truly
knew the right course of action. Socrates defines moral as being the logical result of rational
thought. Through reason, one will know morality. Plato, a student of Socrates, held a similar
view. In the 4th Century BC, Aristotle had his theory called Nicomachean Ethics, which
propagated theories of Virtues – essentially Good Habits. He also propagated the Golden
Rule – essentially, in common language, also known as the Principle of Reciprocity – ‘Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you’

Ethics can essentially be divided into two branches:

Normative Ethics and Meta Ethics

• Normative ethics are about which actions are right and wrong, or which character
traits are good and bad. Normative ethics tries to discover criteria or rules with
which moral judgments can be made

– Judgments of moral obligation – judging the rightness and wrongness of

actions
– Judgments of moral value – judging the goodness and badness of persons
– Judgments of non-moral value

Meta ethics, on the other hand, is a study of the nature of ethics. So it does not concentrate
on the action, but concentrates on the nature of the action.

Normative ethics is further divided into:

Relativism
Teleological theories
Deontological theories

Relativism is a theory that is universal in nature, trying to propagate that ethics is relative
in nature. They are dependent on individual and society, and there is no common, universal
standard that can apply to all actions to judge them as good or bad. No common standards
can judge morality and values of a particular culture, and therefore, the ethics and morality
behind individual actions are completely relative. This is also known as cultural relativism.

Professionally, and in the business parlance, this translates into being able to acknowledge
and work with diverse groups of people and being able to face the challenges related to the
diversity.

Teleological theories are derived from the Greek word Telos, meaning End. They
determine rightness and wrongness of actions by looking at the end of the action. It is a
consequentialist form, which determines rightness and wrongness of an action by looking at
the consequences of the action.

In it, the primary forms are Egoism and Utilitarianism.

Egoism relates to the consequence of the good produced from the action benefiting only the
agent of the action. The ‘good’ here can be pleasure, happiness or perfection. Hedonistic
principle states the obvious behind maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

Utilitarianism was founded by Jeremy Bentham, who was an English Jurist, Philosopher and
legal and social reformer. His basic principle was that, the right act or policy is that; which
would cause "the greatest good for the greatest number of people", also known as "the
greatest happiness principle", or ‘the principle of utility’. The good produced from any act
should benefit the maximum number of people.

Traditional Utilitarianism

The utilitarian principal holds that:

An action is right from ethical point of view, if and only if, the sum total of utilities produced
by that act is greater than the sum total of utilities produced by any other act the agent
could have performed in its place.

Utilitarianism holds that in the final analysis only one action is right: that one action whose
net benefits are greatest by comparison to the net benefits of all other possible alternatives.
Both the immediate and all foreseeable future costs and benefits that each alternative will
provide for each individual must be taken into account as well as any significant indirect
effects.
One must determine what alternative actions or policies are available to one at any
occasion, for each alternative action one must estimate the direct and indirect benefits and
costs that the action would produce for each and every person affected by the action in the
foreseeable future. The alternative that produces the greatest sum total of utility must be
chosen as the ethically appropriate course of action.
Utilitarianism also has the advantage of being able to explain why we hold that certain types
of activities are generally morally wrong (lying, adultery, killing), while others are generally
morally right (telling the truth, fidelity, keeping one’s promises). Traditional utilitarians
would deny, however, that any kinds of actions are always right or always wrong.
Utilitarian views have typically been used in economics, techniques of economic cost benefit
analysis, and efficiency.
John Stuart Mill, a disciple of Bentham, went ahead and classified happiness and
contentment, claiming that the former has higher value than the latter. He says:
‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is
because they only know their own side of the question’
Here, happiness or pleasure can be looked at as a variety of pleasures like sensual,
intellectual, etc. The quality of pleasure is more important than the quantity of pleasure
derived.

Deontological theories, on the other hand, look at rules and duties. This is derived from
the Greek word ‘Deon’ meaning obligation or duty. It is an approach to ethics that judges
the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules.

A basis for moral rights: Immanuel Kant

Kant says that to act in the morally right way, people must act from duty. Second, he said,
that it was not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but the motives
of the person who carries out the action.
This begins with an argument that the highest good must be both good in itself, and good
without qualification.

Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived
which could be called good without qualification except a good will

Kant's theory is based on a moral principal that he calls the Categorical Imperative and it
requires that everyone should be treated as a free person equal to everyone else.

Kant's first version of the categorical imperative:

An action is morally right for a person in a certain situation if, and only if, the person’s
reason for carrying out the action is a reason that he or she would be willing to have every
person act on, in any similar situation.

There is an obvious similarity between the categorical imperative and "golden rule": "Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you."

The first formulation of the categorical imperative, then, incorporates two criteria for
determining moral right and wrong: universalizability and reversibility.

Unlike the principal of utilitarianism, Kant's categorical imperative focuses on person’s

interior motivations and not on the consequences of one’s external actions.

The second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative

An action is morally right for a person if, and only if, in performing the action, the person
does not use others merely as a means for advancing his or her own interests, but also both
respects and develops their capacity to choose freely for themselves.

Kant argues that making fraudulent contracts by deceiving others is wrong and that
deliberately refraining from giving others help when they need it is also wrong.

Both formulations come down to the same thing: people are to treat each other as free and
equal in the pursuit of their interests.

Kantian Rights:

In defense of Kant's two formulations of the categorical imperative:

Human beings have a clear interest in being helped by being provided with the work, food,
clothing, housing, and medical care they need to live on when they cannot provide these for
themselves. They also have a clear interest in being free from injury or fraud and in being
free to think, associate, speak, and live privately as they choose.

The Libertarian objection:

Libertarian philosophers go beyond the general presumption that freedom from human
constraint is usually good, to claim that such freedom is necessarily good and that all
constraints imposed by others are necessarily evil except when needed to prevent the
imposition of greater human constraints.
Since granting of freedom to one person necessarily imposes constraints on others, it
follows that if constraints require justification, then freedom will also always require
justification. This means that we cannot argue in favor of a certain kind of freedom by
simply claiming that constraints are always evil and must always been replaced by freedom.
Instead, an argument for a specific freedom must show that the interests that can be
satisfied by that kind of freedom are somehow better or more worth satisfying than the
interests that other opposing kinds of freedoms could satisfy.

W. D Ross’s Theory:

W. D. Ross says that there are seven right making features of moral action:

• Duty of beneficence: A duty to help other people (improve conditions of others)

• Duty of non-maleficence: A duty to avoid harming other people.
• Duty of justice: A duty to ensure people get what they deserve.
• Duty of self-improvement: A duty to improve ourselves.
• Duty of reparation: A duty to recompense someone if you have acted wrongly
towards them.
• Duty of gratitude: A duty to benefit people who have benefited us.
• Duty of promise-keeping: A duty to act according to explicit and implicit promises,
including the implicit promise to tell the truth.

He called these prima facie duties, because when a person tries to decide how to act, each
of these duties need to be taken into consideration when deciding which duty should be
acted upon. When more than one of these "duties" applies to a person in some situation,
only one should be acted upon.