A persistent problem in the United States and other countries is issues related to ethics. Many philosophers over the centuries have created works and theories on ethics, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Ethics can generally be defined as the study of morality (Cohen, p. 17). Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics said that Virtue... being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue owes essentially both its birth and its growth to teaching (which is why it requires experience and time), while moral virtue arises from the result of habit. (Cohen, p. 79) I think these ideas serve as a basis for ethics in general, but as society has progressed, there was and is a need to adapt different types of ethics. I will focus particularly on the rules of ethics in this essay. Two specific philosophers who have contributed to this branch of ethics are John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. John Stuart Mill's theories on utilitarianism can be described as follows: actions are morally justified or morally unjustified depending on the amount of good and evil they can bring to the world through their execution (Cohen, 2000, p. 22 ). I agree with John Stuart Mill in his utilitarian approach to ethics in other areas, but I don't think it's the best solution in a business or financial environment. My reasoning for the above statement develops from Mill's "greatest happiness principle", according to which actions are good insofar as they tend to promote happiness, bad insofar as they tend to produce happiness. opposite of happiness. By happiness we mean pleasure and the absence of pain; through unhappiness, pain and deprivation of pleasure. (Mill, p.9) Although this interpretation does not necessarily mean that free enterprise......middle of document......it does show that self-interest was taken into account in business but not good will. Executives of these companies engaged in unethical behavior that deliberately harmed consumers. I believe that the legal system should take into consideration deliberate violations of ethics, based on the Kantian model suggested previously. There are many other examples, including KeySpan Energy Corporation, in which companies violate ethics, but the United States does not currently have specific laws to punish this behavior. If the laws were based on Kant's theories of goodwill rationality and the maxims of the categorical imperative, I believe that some of these violations could be punished as such and that no laws would need to be enforced. be revised or rewritten. This would act as a deterrent to future violations and benefit society. In short, it is our duty to conduct our business ethically..