Lesson 5:Business Ethics

Business Ethics

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What is privacy and its value
 Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in all
major, international treaties and agreements on human
rights. Nearly every country in the world recognized privacy
as a fundamental human right in their constitutions.

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 Ethan Latch says it is “ the ability to control what others can
come to know about you”.
 Why do we care that someone knows our personal
information? We can imagine items of personal data that we
simply do not want others knowing, whether or not they
would actually do something with that information.

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 Ultimately, the failure to protect privacy may leads to an
inability to protect personal freedom and autonomy.
 Specifically in connection with privacy, ethical issues arise
with gathering information, assessing its accuracy, correcting
it and disclosing it.
 The privacy value ought to be protected as a right.

 The arguments developed by philosophers and legal theorists

fall into two categories:
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1. Utilitarian argument that appeal to consequences
2. Kantian argument that links privacy to being a person or
having respect for person.
 The utilitarian’s say that great harm is done to individual
when inaccurate or incomplete information collected by an
employer is used for making important personnel decisions.
 According to Kant, Invading a person’s privacy violates the
principle of respect for persons and prevents a persons from
making a rational choice as an autonomous body. 5
The implementation of ethical resolution

 To resolve the issue of privacy, a fairness based decision is

suggested. This decision is base on two values: integrity and
accountability.
 Integrity, means consistency in values, would require that the
decision maker define his/her values, as well as create a
prioritization of those values.

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 This effort is often accomplished by a firm’s mission
statement or statement of values.
 Second, no matter which direction is taken, the decision maker
must be accountable to anyone who is impacted by this
decision.
 Applying this process to a firm’s response to monitoring and
its impact on employee privacy.
 The firm may obtain guidance from its mission statement.
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 Does monitoring satisfy or further the mission or values of
the firm? if yes, the employer must impose monitoring in a
manner that is accountable to those affected by the decision
to monitor.
 The employer should give adequate notice of the intent to
monitor, including the from of monitoring, its frequency, and
the purpose of monitoring.

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 In addition, to balance the employers’ interests with those of
the workforce, the employer should offer a means by which
the employee can control the monitoring in order to create
personal boundaries.

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Consumer privacy
 Customer privacy measures are those taken by commercial
organizations to ensure that confidential customers data is
not stolen or abused.

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 Since most such organizations have strong competitive
incentive to retain an exclusive access to these data
 Since customer trust is usually a high priority, most
companies take some security measures to protect customer
privacy.
 However, these vary in effectiveness, and would not typically
meet the much higher standards of customrs confidentiality
applied by ethical codes.

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 Since they operate for-profit, commercial organizations also
cannot spend an unlimited amount on precautions and remain
competitive.
 A commercial activities tends to limit privacy measures, and
to motivate organizations to share data when working in
partnership.
 Consumer privacy laws and regulations need to protect any
individual from loss of privacy due to failures or limitations of
corporate customer privacy measures. 12
Explain the affirmative action of discrimination

 The term affirmative action refers to policies that take gender,

race or ethnicity into account in an attempt to promote equal
opportunities.
 The focus of such policies range from employment and
public contracting to educational outreach and health
programs.

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 Affirmative action polices combat the continuing effects
through positive measures to achieve more representative
distributions of minorities and women within firms by
giving preferences to women and minorities, in hiring,
promotion, etc.

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Explain the employee’s obligations to the firm.
As an employee of any organization one is expected to fulfill
certain norms. The employees are expected to:
 Punctuality

 Respect organizational culture and ethical principles.

 Work to the best of their ability throughout formal hoarse
 Apply their soft skills to improve quality, productivity and to
achieve organizations’ goal
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 Take care of employers and business property.
 Follow your employer’s reasonable and lawful instructions
(the is, instructions that are not illegal, don’t threaten your
health and safety and you are capable of doing)
 Obey safety rules

 Not act in way that puts you or others at risk of injury in the
workplace

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Explain the firm’s duties to employees

Compensation- the basic moral obligation that the employers has

toward employees, according to the rational view of the firm, is
to provide them with the compensation they have freely and
knowingly agreed to receive in exchange for their services.

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 Working environment- workplace hazards include like,
mechanical injury, electrocution and burns, extreme heat and
cold, noisy machinery, textile fiber dust, chemical fumes,
poisons, skin irritants, and radiation. Hence,

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1. employers should offer wages that reflect the risk-premium
based other similar but competitive labor markets.
2. To insure their workers against unknown hazards the
employer should provide them with suitable health insurance
program
3. Employers should collect information on the health hazards
that accompany a given job and make all such information
available to workers.

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Jobs satisfaction/job rotation
In order to avoid job dissatisfaction and boredom, jobs must be
expanded along five dimensions:

1. skill variety, the degree to which a job requires the worker to

perform activities that challenge his skills and abilities.
2. Task identity:- the degree to which the job requires a
completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work doing a job
from beginning to end with a visible outcome

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3.Task significance:- the degree to which the job has a
substantial and perceivable impact on lives of other people,
whether in the immediate organization or the society at large.

4. Autonomy:- the degree to which the job gives the worker

freedom, independence, and discretion.
5. Feedback:- the degree to which a worker, in carrying out the
work activities required the job, gets information and feedback
about the effectiveness of this efforts

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