ABSTRACT
In the academic field of business ethics, few would claim to be consequentialists, and, in fact, most find consequentialism in tension with ethics not a source of it, in part because consequentialism is often associated with a focus on either happiness or utility—oftentimes economic—rather than ethical values. The non-consequentialist, in contrast, is one who thinks that the rightness or wrongness of an action is not determined by its consequences but by some feature inherent to the action itself. It will be useful to explain more clearly consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of ethics, and then highlight some of the key examples of how they have been applied in the field of business ethics. Non-consequentialist theories of ethics find the basis of ethics in some sort of rules not based on consequences. The intuitive appeal of non-consequentialism is that happy consequences and ethical behavior do not, in fact, seem to be necessarily connected.
