ethics

Unlike most topics in the MBA curriculum, which have remained fairly consistent for decades, ethics is a new area. What appeared at first to be only a trendy elective course has now become institutionalized as part of the MBA curriculum at Harvard, Wharton, and Darden. With the criminal convictions of insider traders in the 1980s, business schools took notice and jumped on the ethics bandwagon in the 1990s. In the new century, the collapses on Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, the mutual fund trading scandals, Martha Stewart's stock sales, and the revelations of accounting fraud have kept ethics on the front burner.   

Ben Franklin

When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.

J. H. Kellogg

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.

Sri Aurobindo

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who are at tis mercy: animals. And in this respect, human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.

Leonardo Da Vinci

As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.

Howard Lyman

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, of course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.