Business Ethics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

University of Copenhagen - Denmark: Philosophy of Money - Drawing on resources from history, sociology and particularly philosophy, we will investigate how money is related to themes like religion, politics, morality, nature, and care. Focusing on key concepts such as debt, gift, trust, power, and commodity, the course will discuss classical philosophical texts by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Smith, Marx, and Nietzsche, and relate them to present-day issues concerning student-debt, care-economy and eco-capitalism. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In all societies, whether religious or secular, ethics is concerned with attempts by human beings to define what is good or bad, that is, to determine what conditions will ensure human well-being, fulfilment or happiness, and what prevents this possibility. Ethics is also concerned with defining what is right and wrong , that is, what rules need to be laid down by society to ensure that the health and well-being of people is promoted and wrong-doing prevented. In ethics we seek to establish understanding and agreement about these matters by rational argument and debate. Our object is to establish what general principles and practical rules are necessary to ensure the flourishing of individuals and the whole of society, including business and economic activity, scientific endeavour, culture and the arts, and the whole political order. This unit involves a general introduction to the methods of corporate and applied ethics, including methods for: Personal, Professional and Corporate Values Clarification related to Quality Improvement The application of fundamental ethical principles in sound ethical decision-making Setting Corporate and Operational ethical policies in business and industry. The following are a selection of possible areas in which students may choose to concentrate: Corporate and business ethics Professional ethics Bio-medical & Nursing ethics Environmental Ethics Ethics, Law and Politics Ethics and Science HK - Hong Kong, China: Entrepreneurship is one of the defining vocations of our age. Founders shape what we eat, where we live, how we work, and what we attend to. They distribute power and risk, opportunity and harm. And yet the deepest questions raised by entrepreneurial life are not technical or strategic but philosophical: What is enterprise for? What does it mean to build well? To whom does a founder owe an account? This seminar takes those questions seriously. It treats entrepreneurship not merely as a set of skills to be acquired but as a form of human activity that can be examined, evaluated, and ordered toward genuine human goods. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophical sources-Aristotle and Aquinas, MacIntyre and Sandel, alongside Christensen, Thiel, and the major documents of modern Catholic social thought-students will learn to read entrepreneurial decisions philosophically: as choices about ends, virtues, obligations, and the common good. The course is structured around close reading of primary texts, sustained seminar discussion, and weekly case studies that test theoretical commitments against the realities of building, scaling, and disrupting. Topics include the moral status of innovation; the limits of markets; the obligations founders owe to workers, users, and communities; the ethics of artificial intelligence and surveillance; the place of profit in the common good; and what it would mean to call a founder, a firm, or a technology genuinely good. Aimed at students from business, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities, the course is for anyone who suspects that practical wisdom, not strategic cleverness, is the harder and more urgent thing to learn.