Learning objectives In this chapter, we shall: Refect on the nature of production and the conceptual di ferences between action and production. Explore the purpose of the business frm as a community of people, as well as the issues that arise therefrom related to the virtue of justice and property rights. Draw attention to the issues concerning production and the environment that emerged with modernity and industrialization. Nature has endowed living beings with the functions needed to survive in their environment. However, human beings go beyond biology and turn to culture to satisfy their needs. Instead of adapting to the environment, human beings adapt the environment to themselves. Because of this, human beings in production seek what they consider to be a certain kind of good. “Good is ascribed […] both to what benefts human beings as such and to what benefts human beings in par- ticular roles within particular contexts of practice” (MacIntyre 2012 [1999]: 65). The economist J.M. Keynes noted that, [f]rom the earliest times of which we have record–back, say, to two thou- sand years before Christ–down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth. (Keynes 1972: 359) 4 VIRTUES AND THE COMMON GOODIN PRODUCTION Germán Scalzo