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Chapter Objectives
After exploring this chapter, you will be able to:
1. Explain why ethics is important in the business environment;
2. Explain the nature of business ethics as an academic discipline;
3. Distinguish the ethics of personal integrity from the ethics of
social responsibility (CSR)
4. Distinguish ethical norms and values from other business-
related norms and values
5. Distinguish legal responsibilities from ethical responsibilities
6. Explain why ethical responsibilities go beyond legal
compliance
7. Distinguish ethical decision-making from other practical
decision situations
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Purpose of our discussion:
Learning Objectives
Sensitivity: To insure that you are aware of/sensitive to
ethical issues in all aspects of the business environment and
professional exchanges.
Skill-Building: To provide you with reasoning and decision-
making tools to help you think through ethical issues and to
respond sensibly when faced with such issues.
Integration: To enable you to effectively integrate your
personal values and reasoning skills into all of what you do
and stand for.
(Continued)
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Purpose of our discussion:
Learning Objectives
Practice: To give you opportunities to "practice" values
integration and ethical reasoning processes in case
experiences.
Understanding: To offer you a deep understanding of the
role you play in forming organizational culture and the means
by which you can impact it in a positive manner.
Reinforcement: To reinforce the resources available to you if
confronted with ethical situations.
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Business ethics is a process of
responsible decision-making
The scandals and ruin experienced since the Enron collapse
were brought about by ethical failures.
We will discuss a decision-making model that can help
individuals to understand such failures and avoid future
business and personal tragedies.
Why explore ethics in business?
Because
Ethics Failures = Business Failures
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Why is ethics important in the
business environment?
Consider the range of people who were harmed by the
collapse of Enron.
Stockholders lost over $1 billion in stock value.
Thousands of employees lost their jobs, their retirement funds,
and their health care benefits.
Consumers in California suffered from energy shortages and
blackouts that were caused by Enron’s manipulation of the
market.
Hundreds of businesses that worked with Enron as suppliers
suffered economic loss with the loss of a large client.
(continued)
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Why is ethics important in the
business environment?
Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, went out of
business as a direct result.
The wider Houston community was also hurt by the loss of a
major employer and community benefactor.
Families of employees, investors, suppliers were also hurt.
Many of the individuals directly involved will themselves suffer
criminal and civil punishment, including prison sentences for
some.
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Stakeholder Theory
In a general sense, a business stakeholder will be anyone affected, for
better or worse, by decisions made within the firm.
Stakeholder theory is a model of corporate social responsibility that
holds that business managers have ethical responsibilities to this more
broad range of stakeholders, as opposed to a more narrow view that
the primary responsibility of managers is limited to stockholders.
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Why care about ethics?
Unethical behavior creates financial and marketing risks.
A company can go out of business, and its employees can go
to jail, if no one is paying attention to the ethical standards of
the firm.
A firm’s ethical reputation can provide a competitive
advantage, or disadvantage.
Consumer boycotts give even the most skeptical business
leader reason to pay attention to ethics.
Managing ethically can also pay significant dividends in
organizational structure and efficiency.
Trust, loyalty, commitment, creativity, and initiative are just
some of the organizational benefits that are more likely to
flourish within ethically stable and credible organizations
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Food shortage
Rana is a sharp minded business man. He is quite updated and seeks opportunities to earn
money. Along with his business activities he is also engaged in the social circles around
him. He is an active member of several NGOs and welfare societies. Donating a part
from his income on welfare work is his practice.
He comes to know that there is a severe food shortage in an underdeveloped city. A
bright idea comes to his mind to avail the opportunity to earn huge profit. He arrives to
that city with a lot of food stuff to sell to starving people. He plans to sell all the food
stuff at higher prices as poor people are ready to spend all their life savings to buy and
store food.
After few hours of his arrival, he is informed that few heavy vehicles with food items
from different NGOs are on the way to supply food free of cost. The poor people are still
unaware of this news and not expecting help from the government and independent
welfare bodies.
Rana can make a huge profit if he does not tell the locals about the incoming of the
vehicles to supply food. Informing people will give him nothing.
Question:
What should Rana do?
1-11
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Business Ethics as Ethical
Decision-Making
Decisions which follow from a process of thoughtful and
conscientious reasoning will be more responsible and ethical
decisions. Responsible decision-making and consideration
will result in more responsible behavior.
The point of a business ethics course?
To learn about the great ethicists of history such as Aristotle, John
Stuart Mill, and Immanual Kant (the informational content of the
class)
To explore ethical behavior, to consider how human beings
properly should live their lives.
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What is “ethics?”
Ethics involves what is perhaps the most monumental question any
human being can ask:
At its most basic level, ethics is concerned with how we act and how we live our
lives.
Ethics is, in this sense, practical, having to do with how we act, choose,
behave, do things.
Philosophers often emphasize that ethics is normative, in that it deals
with our reasoning about how we should act.
Social sciences such as psychology and sociology also examine human
decision-making and actions, but these sciences are descriptive rather
than normative.
They provide an account of how and why people do act the way they do;
as a normative discipline, ethics seeks an account of how and why people
should act, rather than how they do act.
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What is “ethics?”
This fundamental question of ethics can be interpreted in two ways.
"We" can mean each one of us individually, or it might mean all of us
collectively.
In the first sense, this is a question about how I should live my life, how I
should act, what I should do, what kind of person I should be.
This meaning of ethics is sometimes referred to as morality, and it is the
aspect of ethics that we refer to by the phrase “personal integrity.”
How should we live?
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Personal Responsibility vs.
Social Responsibility?
There will be many times within a business setting where an individual will need
to step back and ask:
In the second sense, “How should we live?” refers to how we live together in a
community.
In this sense, business ethics is concerned with how business institutions ought
to be structured, about corporate social responsibility (CSR), about making
decisions that will impact many people other than the individual decision-maker.
This aspect of business ethics asks us to examine business institutions from a
social rather than an individual perspective.
We refer to this broader social aspect of ethics as decision-making for social
responsibility.
What should I do? How should I act?
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Personal Responsibility vs.
Social Responsibility?
In essence, managerial decision-making will always involve
both aspects of ethics.
Each decision made by a business manager not only involves a
personal decision, but also involves making a decision on behalf
of, and in the name of, an organization that exists within a
particular social, legal, and political environment.
Within a business setting, individuals will constantly be asked to
make decisions affecting both their own personal integrity and
their social responsibilities.
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Ethical Norms and Values
A company’s core values, for example, are those beliefs and principles that
provide the ultimate guide in its decision-making.
There are financial, religious, legal, historical, nutritional, political,
scientific, and aesthetic values.
Individuals can have their own personal values and, importantly, institutions
also have values.
Values =
Those beliefs that incline us to act or to choose in
one way rather than another.
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Legal Responsibilities vs.
Ethical Responsibilities
The law provides a very important guide to ethical decision-
making, but legal norms and ethical norms are not identical
nor do they always agree.
Over the last decade, many corporations have established
ethics programs and hired ethics officers who are charged
with managing corporate ethics programs.
Much good work gets done by ethics officers, but it is fair to
say that much of this focuses on compliance issues. The
Sarbanes-Oxley Act created a dramatic and vast new layer of
legal compliance issues.
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How is ethical decision-making
different from other decision-
making?
Ethics is a part of practical reason, reasoning about what we
should do, as opposed to theoretical reason, which is
reasoning about what we should believe.
Theoretical reason is the pursuit of truth, which is the highest
standard for what we should believe.
According to this tradition, science is the great arbiter of truth.
Science provides the methods and procedures for determining
what is true.
Thus, the scientific method can be thought of as the answer to the
fundamental questions of theoretical reason: What should we
believe?
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Philosophical Ethics and Theories
Is there a comparable methodology or procedure for deciding
what we should do and how we should act?
There are guidelines that can provide direction and criteria for
decisions that are more or less reasonable and responsible:
philosophical ethics.
These traditions, or what are often referred to as ethical theories,
explain and defend various norms, standards, values, and
principles that contribute to responsible ethical decision-making.
Ethical theories are patterns of thinking, or
methodologies, to help us decide what to do.
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Chapter One Vocabulary Terms
After examining this Chapter, you should have a clear
understanding of the following Key Terms and you will find
them defined in the Glossary:
Ethics
Morality/Social Justice
Values
Normative ethics/Descriptive ethics
Stakeholders
Stakeholder Theory
Practical Reasoning
