Natural Law Provides a Helpful Response to Ethical Issues in Busines

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Natural Law provides a helpful response to ethical issues in business. Discuss Natural law could be considered to be a helpful response to any ethical dilemma because it provides clear and absolute principles for people to follow. However, an issue with this is whether having one ‘rule’ for business is helpful, due to the diverse nature of the business world and the wide variety of ethical concerns that may arise. Natural Law is anthropocentric and considers that the main priority in life is for humans to fulfil their God given purpose and so it would decide upon ethical dilemmas on the basis of whether it helped or hindered a person in fulfilling their telos. The fundamental principle of Natural Law is to do good and to avoid evil – a difficulty with this would be that this often requires a value judgement as it may not be clear where the ‘good’ is to be found. Our telos, for Aquinas, is reached by ensuring that we follow the Primary precepts. The first of these is to preserve life. Clearly in a business context this would mean that Natural Law would not advocate allowing businesses to develop by experimenting on Human embryos as this could be classed as being involved in the destruction of life. In the same way it would judge as unethical private health companies that were involved in undertaking abortions. However, this may be an unrealistic approach in the 21st century. We live in a country where abortion is legal and where in many circumstances people would consider it to be a compassionate response to difficult situations. It could be argued therefore that in this case Natural Law is not helpful – an absolute response may not be called for in situations where the context is important and also it may not be appropriate to ‘preserve life’ on the basis of a Christian Ethic which is not always relevant in the modern secular world. For many people in this
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