Abstract

Globalization presents ethical challenges that moral relativism cannot meet. Act- and principle-centered and consequentialist theories are used to justify policies that leave out the personal dimension in ethics. Virtue ethics, which places the emphasis for ethical evaluation on the agent and his or her character, is now recognized as a viable alternative to these theories. While virtue ethics is usually associated with Aristotle, I suggest that Spinoza’s ethics is better suited to business ethics and global business ethics than other virtue ethicists. Spinoza’s relevance to business ethics in a global world has been ignored, yet the importance of his philosophy for deep ecology has been widely recognized. Spinoza’s capacity for providing the philosophical framework environmentalists require contributes to making Spinoza’s ethics especially attractive for businessmen with ecological concerns.