Reviewer for Business Ethics

University of Santo Tomas – Legazpi

By Mr. Jaime Ramir M. Apostol
Subject Teacher

Defining Business
 The activity of making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in exchange for money
 Work that is part of a job
 The amount of activity that is done by a store, company, factory, etc.
 Business etymology: bisignes – Old English which originally means “care, anxious, occupied,
diligent.”
 This etymology reveals that business does not originally mean an organization or a trade
in our modern sense of the term with all its rules, complexities and bureaucracies.
Rather, business is one’s occupation, engagement of work.
 Duska and Ragatz, two business ethics scholars, said that the original and primary meaning of
business is “to engage in purposeful activity.”
 Following the etymology, business is an activity that one does with care and diligence and
anxiousness. To be busy is to be preoccupied not only with the task itself by also how well the
task is performed. One cannot be truly busy and accomplish nothing at all. The contemporary
understanding and usage of the of the noun Business.

Businessperson vs. Entrepreneur

FIRST. A plain businessperson is usually concerned simply with the “business aspect” of the
enterprise, that is, how can activities be arranged and organized in such a way that guarantees
profit.
 Entrepreneurs on the other hand, are more concerned with the “insight aspect” of an
enterprise, or how new and private ideas can be applied so that it may have more social
utility. This goes without saying that Entrepreneurs do not forget the financial returns of
their ideas as contribution to the society.
SECOND. The entrepreneur is an innovator while many businessperson are usually mere
imitators. Peter Drucker, a prominent business management scholar, not only argued for the
innovative behavior of an entrepreneur but also his or her essentially dissenting character.
 Drucker said: “the entrepreneur does not just agree; the entrepreneur upsets and
disorganizes. He or she destroys in order to build a something new.”
 Or as the economist Joseph Schumpeter said: “the job of the entrepreneur is Creative
Destruction.”
 The Entrepreneur is very observant. He or she pays close attention and sensitivity to
the changes in the society and to the movement of the wants and needs of the
market.
 The plain businessperson waits for the innovations made by the entrepreneur. Then,
business-minded as the plain businessperson is, he or she copies and imitates what the
entrepreneur has created.
 Thus, there may be real temptation for the entrepreneur to be disappointed or even be
discouraged to further innovate. But with full consideration of existing laws on copyright
and piracy, we can consider that imitation is part of the dynamics of a healthy market
economy. The innovation must be initiated so that the market will be leveled again
which will lead for more potential innovations.
THIRD. The entrepreneur is more of a risk-taker than the plain businessperson. The
entrepreneur takes the risk but, of course, calculates it. He or she is optimistic of his or her
success and not afraid to fail. The pure and plain businessperson is more likely to play it safe. He
or she is contented with taking the common road and using the tested model formula. The
entrepreneur on-the-other-hand thinks outside the box or even thinks without the box.
FOURTH. The plain businessperson is usually motivated by the financial reward of the business
activity. On the other hand, the entrepreneur goes beyond the profit motive.
FIFTH. More often than not, the entrepreneurs are founders of companies and other forms of
business organizations. They set vision, mission, goals, and values of the companies; they set
and envision the corporate culture.

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Reviewer for Business Ethics
University of Santo Tomas – Legazpi
By Mr. Jaime Ramir M. Apostol
Subject Teacher

Ethics
 Now what I ethics? According to Jones, Ten Bos, and Parker, “ethics came from the Greek word
Ethos which means character, habit, dwelling place.”
 Clarence Walton reports that Aristotle derived the term ethics from ethos which, in turn, found
its source in ethimos which means regularity and routine.
 Thus, ethos may refer to one’s character which is a product of on does regularly and repeatedly
so that it has already become routine.
 Ethics also originally linked with how one lives in relation with other people. Mollie Painter-
Morland reports on how the French Michel Foucalt unravels the idea that the Greeks, “ethos is a
way of being and a form of behavior that is frimly rooted in relationships.”
 Thus,Painter-Morland concludes that ethics “has both an individual and communal dimension. It
requires, first and foremost, that one takes care of oneself and learns to understand oneself.
Only than can on conduct oneself appropriately in one’s interpersonal relationships and thus
occupy one’s rightful position in a community.”
 Of course, at present, Ethics has become a specialized discipline. Here are some representative
definitions and descriptions of Ethic as a discipline or field of study:
 Ethics, from the Greek word ethos, encompasses the study of moral problems, practical
reasoning, right and wrong, good and bad, virtues and vices, character, moral duty, and related
issues involving the nature, origins, and scope of oral values. Today, it is not uncommon for
Ethicists to specialize to specialize in medical ethics, business ethics, issues of ethnicity and
gender, and the nature of the good life. Ethical issues include truth-telling, relativism, and
universality.
 Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society.
It asks how these standards apply to our lives and whether those standards are reasonable or
unreasonable.
 The discipline of ethics essentially boils down to a search for underlying objective standards and
reasoning for taking a particular couse of action or conduct or desisting from an action or
conduct, as the case may be.
 Ethics is the study of what is good and evil, right or wrong, and just and unjust.
 Ethics is the branch of Philosophy that deals with morality. Ethicists are concerned with a wide
range of topics such as human nature; the meaning of life; the nature of value; how judgments
are made; how judgments can be improved; how moral attitudes arise and changes; and the
workings of morally significant mental states such as love, hate, greed, envy, indifference, pity,
desire, aversion, pleasure, and pain. Moral or ethical theories offer means of understanding
significant elements in these and other areas of inquiry.
 Ethics then becomes a practical science designed to test logically the rightness or wrongness of
human acts.
 Ethics talks about how we behave and how we should behave as human beings different from
animals, plants and other known creatures. It is a subject that reiterates and validates our
authentic human-ness and humanity. It makes us realize again that man is a free creature
endowed with intellect and rationality.
 An it is from these unique human features that our capacity to think, reason out, choose, and
decide flows abundantly.
 Ethics as an academic subject and an intellectual endeavor spells out many of our day-to-day
confusions about our actions and our thoughts.
 Ethics is an interesting subject because it talks about life. Ethics talks about our life with all its
complications, difficulties, problems and brokenness.
 Similarly, it also talks about our capacity to resolve these complications, overcome these
difficulties, face these problems, and come to grips with life brokenness.