An ongoing problem in the United States and other countries are issues of 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 on the Nicomachean Ethics said that Virtue... being of two types, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue mostly owes its birth and growth to teaching (for this reason it requires experience and time), while morality arises as a result of habit. (Cohen, p. 79) I believe these ideas serve as the basis for ethics in general, but as society progressed it was and is necessary to adapt different types of ethics. In this essay I will focus particularly on the ethics of rules. Two specific philosophers who contributed to this branch of ethics are John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. John Stuart Mill's theories on utilitarianism can be described as; actions are morally justified or morally unjustified depending on the amount of good and bad they can be expected to bring into the world through their execution (Cohen, 2000, p. 22). I agree with John Stuart Mill in his utilitarian approach to ethics in other topics, but I don't think it's the best fit in a business or financial environment. My reasoning for the above statement develops from Mill's “greatest happiness principle” that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the opposite of happiness. By happiness we mean pleasure and the absence of pain; from unhappiness, pain and deprivation of pleasure. (Mill, p.9) While this interpretation does not necessarily mean that free enterprise… at the center of the paper… these show that in business self-interest was taken into account but not goodwill. Executives at these companies engaged in unethical behavior that deliberately harmed consumers. I believe that the legal system should take into account deliberate violations of ethics based on the Kantian model suggested above. There are many other examples, including KeySpan Energy Corporation, where companies violate ethics, but the United States currently has no clear laws to punish such behavior. If the laws were based on Kant's theories of rationality of good will and the maxims of the categorical imperative, I believe that some of these violations could be punished as such and no laws would need to be revised or rewritten. This would act as a deterrent against future violations and benefit society. In short, it is your duty to conduct business ethically.