ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the meaning and scope of the virtues and the common good in business, in accordance with Aristotle, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and Alasdair MacIntyre. It illustrates how personal virtues enmesh with corporate culture and traditions. Virtue ethics is one of the three major schools of ethics in business and management, together with utilitarianism and deontology. The virtue ethics tradition is "agent-centered", focusing on what choices and decisions do to individuals, while utilitarianism and deontology are "action-centered". In business and management, deontology has been dominant in theory, with the proliferation of organizational codes of conduct, while utilitarianism has been dominant in practice. Although virtues as "excellences" apply primarily to character, they speak to other dispositions to action such as habits as well. In a recent work "Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity", MacIntyre emphasizes that both the goal and the path of ethics as practical reasoning are common goods.
