"The unexamined life is not worth living"

Immortalized in these words, Socrates the great moral philosopher set the task of ethical theory. But to search for basic moral principles and to attempt to solve problems concerning the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, is not the exclusive province of philosophers. In the world we live in today managers and business people also need to conduct ethical enquiry. Be it Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, time and again ethics have been referred to as the soul of conducting business.

With liberalization and globalization bringing sweeping changes to how business has been done in the closing years of the 20th century, there has been a spurt of activity towards evaluation and validation of goals, concepts and practices both in government and in business.

The debate has been whether ethical capacity is an inherent quality of human beings or needs to be inculcated over time. Is it possible for one to learn to be ethical or more so, to accept societies’ morals and values.

Ethics, as a set of moral values even within the business perspective, has never had fixed boundaries. It constantly evolves with the passage of time and emerging new ideological bases. However, practitioners of business ethics have the problem of subscribing to different ideological bases or are warped in a lesser evolved ethical climate. This brings in tension and ethical infraction that needs resolution.

Loyola Beacon 2007, the International Conference on Ethics and Corporate Governance to be organized by Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Chennai intends to examine the different facets of Ethics and Corporate Governance, when it comes to conducting business. It aspires to bring together a multitude of scholars, thinkers, academicians and industrialists from around the world to discuss how ethics has to become the soul of conducting business, be it in finance, marketing or human resources.