Business ethics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 4

Business ethics - Essay Example A person cannot be tortured because one has moral rights. Immanuel Kant is a famous philosopher who proposed a theory named categorical imperative. Categorical imperative is based on the moral principle and it is like a command to tell people what can be done and what cannot. The theory claims that everyone is a free person who has moral right and correlative duty to be compared with another in this way. Kant proposed two formulations of categorical imperative. Kant gives us a term â€Å"maxim† which can be explained as follows: â€Å"A maxim for Kant is the reason a person in certain situation has for doing what he or she plans to do. A maxim would â€Å"become a universal law† if every person in a similar situation chose to do the same thing for the same reason.† (p99) According to the definition of maxim, we can understand the first formulation easily. First formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative is that we only can act according to the reasons th at we want others to do the same toward us in a similar situation, which means transpositonal consideration. Furthermore, the action is morally right if a person acts by a reason to others in a certain situation that he or she has the willing to let others treat him or her in the same situation. If the person cannot have the willing to have others to act the same way that he or she acts towards others, the action is morally wrong. The first formulation has two criteria to estimate whether an action is morally right or wrong. The first criterion is universality that means â€Å"the person’s reasons for acting must be reasons that everyone could act on at least in principle.† (p99) The second criteria is reversibility that means â€Å"the person’s reasons for acting must be reasons that that person would be willing to have all others use, even as a basis of how they treat him or her† (p99). The second formulation