1. Aquinas states that if ethics asserts that something is “good,” then there must be a final cause (goodness) toward which all things strive.
2. Absolute good is a concept most aligned to virtue ethics and its proclivity to “perfectionism”
3. Divine command theory is a new theory.
4. The ethical contractarians assert that freely made personal assent gives credence to ethical and social philosophical principles.
5. Contracts need not be explicitly written or verbal acts, but may be implicit.
6. Hobbes asserted that the second law of nature is to give up absolute liberty.
7. Agreement is not sufficient to yield normative prescriptiveness.
8. Virtue ethics is also sometimes called agent-based or character ethics.
9. There is much evidence to suggest that people act for altruistic or moral purposes that seem to have little to do with cost/benefit analyses.
10. In a survey conducted by a national opinion research firm, ethical corporate behavior, honest company communications, and respectful treatment ranked among employees’ five top-ranked goals, before good pay, which was eleventh on the list, and job security, which ranked fourteenth.
11. In this economic perspective on social responsibility, corporations must be socially responsible in order to avoid economic harm and in order to maintain the legitimacy granted by society.
12. Companies will only fulfill their ethical responsibilities after stakeholders make demands.
13. Good business doesn’t refer to just the financial bottom line. It refers to business that does well financially by producing products that meet customers’ needs and by being responsible to employees and the community.
14. An organization that wishes to develop or change its ethical culture must attend to the complex interplay of formal and informal systems that can support either ethical or unethical behavior.
15. With effective cross-cultural training, managers can be trained to be on the lookout for things that would otherwise be ignored, and they will be more able to interpret their international business experiences in light of the belief patterns of the particular culture.