ABSTRACT
Business is ethical when it maximizes long-term owner value subject to distributive justice and ordinary decency. A goal-based approach to doing business provides a basis for the analysis of the praxiological and ethical dimensions of company operations and allows to assess the degree to which this approach can be used outside the economy to analyze other kinds of serious activity. According to Elaine Sternberg, business is a well-defined professional economic activity, the goal of which is the maximization of the value that the longer-term results of that activity, the sale of goods or services, hold for the owner. Effectiveness and efficiency appear as values that are economic sensu stricto when they can be measured in monetary units, and they are economic values sensu lato when they are of a qualitative nature. As for ethical norms in relation to management, W. Griffin says they belong to management ethics, which comprises norms of behavior followed by individual managers in their work.
