ABSTRACT
Bentham and Mill mostly talked about pleasure, and Kant about intentions, but what about all the other words that we use to talk about good and bad? These other words often come in pairs – courage and cowardice, honesty and deceit, cleverness and stupidity, virtue and vice. Most of the time, we would apply these judgement words to people, and specifically to the character of particular people, perhaps to explain why they had spilled a bottle of tomato sauce or burnt the toast. All these words, and many more, surely need to find their place in a theory of ethics too. The third variety of ethical theory that has had a huge influence on the domain of business ethics, and that uses these sort of words routinely, is virtue ethics. This sort of ethics takes the common sense terms that people use every day much more seriously than do ethics based on consequences or intentions. It also insists that ethical ideas are not independent of particular social contexts, and that what is regarded as good in one place might be regarded as bad in another.
