business consumer

Aristotle

• Human goal = flourishing (eudaimonia)

• Virtue is developed through habit and community.

• Good character matters more than rules

G. E. M. Anscombe

Modern morality lacks foundation; revive virtue ethics. (aristotle)

MacIntyre

Lost moral tradition; return to virtue and community.

Husserl

Phenomenology

• Experience always appears to someone

• Subject and world cannot be separated

Levinas

• Face of the Other creates responsibility

• Ethics comes before rules

• Critique of reducing people to categories

• Totality vs Infinity

Max Weber

Rationalization & Bureaucracy

• authority: Traditional / Charismatic / Rational-legal authority

• Bureaucracy runs on rational-legal authority — rules replace values. Distinguishes value-rational action (Kant) from ends-rational action (Eichmann)

Arendt

Banality of Evil

• Evil can be committed by ordinary people obeying systems (eichmann)

Milgram

• Ordinary people obey authority even when harming others

Eichmann

Bureaucratic obedience during the Holocaust

Ritzer

Fast-food logic spreading throughout society.

Paul du Gay

Defense of Bureaucracy

• Bureaucratic impartiality protects equality

Margalit

Bureaucracies can humiliate people

Bauman

• Holocaust enabled by bureaucracy

• Distance hides consequences of actions (manager-supervisor-worker)

Friedman

• Business's responsibility = maximize profits

• Managers should not make political decisions

Business exists to increase profits within the law.

Marx

Commodity Fetishism

• Products hide labor and social relations

• People become invisible behind commodities

Mocked Bentham for assuming the preferences of an English bourgeois to be universal human nature.

Adorno

• "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly"

• Ethics requires critique and resistance

• Resist systems that turn people into commodities.

Bentham

Founded utilitarianism. Pain and pleasure govern all humans. Ethics = maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain for the greatest number. Invented the felicific calculus. Act utilitarianism. Every person counts equally.

John stuart Mill

Refined Bentham. Not all pleasures are equal; higher pleasures exist. Rule utilitarianism. Introduced the harm principle: freedom ends only where you harm others.

Kant

acting from duty, not consequence, fear, or reward

Solomon

Applied Aristotle directly to corporations. Argued businesses are real communities and the right place to cultivate virtues like integrity, loyalty, and honesty. The book finds him too optimistic.