Confucian thought is potentially relevant to business ethics, practice and research in many ways. Yet only a few business ethicists (Koehn 2001a, b, 2013; Romar 2002; Lam 2003; Chan 2008; Woods and Lamond 2011) have taken seriously the possibility that Confucius has important insights to offer regarding normative virtue ethics, which has become the most popular normative theory in terms of the number of recent articles published in business ethics journals. This paper aims to help rectify this oversight. The paper focuses on six distinctive aspects of Confucian ethics, discussing both how Confucius’ approach differs from Aristotelian virtue ethics in significant ways and exploring how these key aspects might play themselves out in a business context. Understanding these differences is critical, given the current upsurge in interest in virtue ethics in general. In addition, by locating some key differences between these two thinkers’ ethics, we can disclose some new arenas for future research by business and managerial ethicists.