Introduction to Business Ethics

Lecture 1
 Ethics is the study of morality
 Morality = The standards that an individual or a
group has about what is right and wrong, or good
and evil.
 Moral Standards = norms about the kinds of actions
that are morally right and wrong, as well as the
values placed on what is morally good or bad
 Non-Moral Standards: The standards by which we
judge what is good or bad and right or wrong in a
non-moral way.
I. Involve significant injuries or benefits
II. Not established by authority figures
III. Should be preferred to other values including self-
interest
IV. Based on impartial considerations
V. Associated with special emotions and vocabulary
 Broadly, ethics is the discipline that examines one’s
moral standards or the moral standards of a society
to evaluate their reasonableness and their
implications for one’s life

 Business ethics is a specialized study of moral right

and wrong that concentrates on moral standards as
they apply to business institutions, organizations,
and behavior.
 Systemic—ethical questions about the social,
political, legal, or economic systems within which
companies operate

 Corporate—ethical questions about a particular

corporation and its policies, culture, climate,
impact, or actions

 Individual—ethical questions about a particular

individual’s decisions, behavior, or character
 View #1: corporations, like people, act intentionally and
have moral rights, and obligations, and are morally
responsible
 View #2: it makes no sense to attribute ethical qualities to
corporations since they are not like people but more like
machines; only humans can have ethical qualities
 View #3: humans carry out the corporation’s actions so
they are morally responsible for what they do and ethical
qualities apply in a primary sense to them; corporations
have ethical qualities only in a derivative sense.
 In a free market economy, the pursuit of
profit will ensure maximum social benefit so
business ethics is not needed

 A manager’s most important obligation is

loyalty to the company regardless of ethics

 So long as companies obey the law they will

do all that ethics requires.
 Ethics applies to all human activities
 Business cannot survive without ethics
 Ethics is consistent with profit seeking
 Customers, employees, and people in general
care about ethics
 Studies suggest ethics does not detract from
profits and seems to contribute to profits.
 Corporate social responsibility refers to a
corporation’s responsibilities or obligations
toward society
 Business ethics is both a part of corporate
social responsibility and part of the
justification for corporate social responsibility
 Shareholder vs. Stakeholder Theory
 Advances in technology often create new
issues for business ethics. – Currently,
advances in information technology are
creating new issues in business ethics
 Increasing connections between the
economic and social systems of different
nations, known as “globalization”, has also
created new issues in business ethics.
Moral Relativism = the theory that there are no
ethical standards that are absolutely true and that
apply or should be applied to the companies and
people of all societies
Objections to Moral Relativism:
– Some moral standards are found in all societies;
– Moral differences do not logically imply
relativism;
– Relativism has incoherent consequences;
– Relativism privileges whatever moral standards
are widely accepted in a society.
 According to the Integrative Social Contracts
Theory (ISCT), there are two kinds of moral
standards:
 Hyper norms: those moral standards that should
be applied to people in all societies
 Micro social norms: those norms that differ from
one community to another and that should be
applied to people only if their community accepts
those particular norms.
 First Level: Pre-conventional Stages
– Stage One: punishment and obedience orientation
– Stage Two: instrumental and relative orientation
 Second Level: Conventional Stages
– Stage One: interpersonal concordance orientation
– Stage Two: law and order orientation
 Third Level: Post-conventional Stages
– Stage One: social contract orientation
– Stage Two: universal principles orientation
 The reasoning process by which human
behaviors, institutions, or policies are judged
to be in accordance with or in violation of
moral standards
 Moral reasoning involves:
 The moral standards by which we evaluate things
 Information about what is being evaluated
 A moral judgment about what is being evaluated.
 Step One: Recognizing a situation is an ethical
situation
 Requires framing it as one that requires ethical
reasoning
 Situation is likely to be seen as ethical when:
▪ involves serious harm that is concentrated, likely, proximate,
imminent, and potentially violates our moral standards
 Obstacles to recognizing a situation:
▪ Euphemistic labeling, justifying our actions, advantageous
comparisons, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of
responsibility, distorting the harm, and dehumanization, and
attribution of blame.
 Step Two: Judging the ethical course of action
 Requires moral reasoning that applies our moral
standards to the information we have about a
situation
 Requires realizing that information about a
situation may be distorted by biased theories
about the world, about others, and about oneself.
 Step Three: Deciding to do the ethical course
of action
 Deciding to do what is ethical can be influenced
by:
▪ The culture of an organization—people’s decisions to do
what is ethical are greatly influenced by their
surroundings
▪ Moral seduction—organizations can also generate a
form of “moral seduction” that can exert subtle
pressures that can gradually lead an ethical person into
decisions to do what he or she knows is wrong
 Step Four: Carrying out the ethical decision
 Factors that influence whether a person carries

out their ethical decision include:

▪ One’s strength or weakness of will

▪ One’s belief about the locus of control of one’s actions

 Three Components of Moral Responsibility
i. Person caused or helped cause the injury, or
failed to prevent it when he or she could and
should have (causality)
ii. Person did so knowing what he or she was doing
(knowledge)
iii. Person did so of his or her own free will
(freedom).
 Minimal contribution
 In general, the less one’s actual actions contribute to the outcome of
an act, the less one is morally responsible for that outcome

 Uncertainty
 A person may be fairly convinced that doing something is wrong yet
may still be doubtful about some important facts, or may have doubts
about the moral standards involved, or doubts about how seriously
wrong the action is

 Difficulty
 A person may find it difficult to avoid a certain course of action
because he or she is subjected to threats or duress of some sort or
because avoiding that course of action will impose heavy costs on the
person.