Ethics in Business

1. Ethics in Business • Integrity • Accountability • Caring • Honesty • Loyalty • Responsible citizenship • Respect for others • Promise keeping • Fairness • Pursuit of excellence

2. Basic Principles • Ethic of care • An ethic that emphasises caring for the concrete well-being of those near to us. • Ethic of virtue • An ethic based on evaluations of the moral character of persons or groups.

3. 1. Utilitarianism • A general term of any view that holds that actions and policies should be evaluated on the basis of the benefits and costs they will impose on society. • Advocates maximising utility • Matches well with moral evaluations of public policies • Appears intuitive to many people • Helps explain why some actions are generally wrong and others are generally right. • Influenced economics.

4. Evaluating Utilitarianism • Critics say not all values can be measured. • Utilitarianism responds that monetary and common sense measures can measure everything. • Critics say utilitarianism fails with rights and justice. • Utilitarianism responds that rule-utilitarianism can deal with rights and justice.

5. 2. Rights and Duties • Legal Right • An entitlement that derives from a legal system that permits or empowers a person to act in a specified way or that requires others to act in certain ways toward that person. • Moral Rights • Rights that human beings of every nationality possess to an equal extent simply by virtue of being human beings.

6. Characteristics of Rights • A right is an individual’s entitlement to something • Rights derived from legal systems are limited by jurisdiction • Moral or human rights are based on moral norms and are not limited by jurisdiction

7. Summary of Moral Rights • Tightly correlated with duties. • Provide individuals with autonomy and equality in the free pursuit of their interests • Provide a basis of justifying one’s actions and for invoking the protection or aid of others.

8. Negative and Positive Rights • Negative Rights • Duties others have to not interfere in certain activities of the person who holds the right. • Positive Rights • Duties of other agents to provide the holder of the right with whatever he or she needs to freely pursue his or her interests.

9. Kinds of Moral Rights • Negative rights require others to leave us alone • Positive rights require others help us. • Contractual or special rights require others to keep arrangements.

10. 3 Justice and Fairness • Types of justice • Distributive Justice: just distribution of benefits and burdens • Retributive Justice: just imposition of punishments and penalties • Compensatory Justice: just compensation for wrongs and injuries

11. Justice and Equality • Political equality • Equal participation in, and treatment by, the political system • Economic equality • Equality of income, wealth and opportunity

12. Justice Based on Contribution • Capitalist Justice • Work ethic; The view that values individual effort and believes that hard work does, and should, lead to success. • Productivity; the a person’s value should be measured by what they produce.

13. Justice based on needs or freedom • Socialist Justice • Work burdens should be distributed according to a person’s abilities, and benefits should be distributed according to a person’s needs. • Libertarianism • Complete freedom to pursue one’s own objectives.

14. Justice as Fairness • The principle of equal liberty • The claim that each citizen’s liberties must be protected from invasion by others and must be equal to those others. • Difference Principle • The claim that a productive society will incorporate inequalities but takes steps to improve the position of the most needy members of society.

15. Principle of fair equality of opportunity • The claim that everyone should be given an equal opportunity to qualify for the more privileged positions in society’s institutions.

16. Types of justice • Retributive • Fairly blaming or punishing persons for doing wrong. • Compensatory • Fairly restoring to a person what the person lost when he or she was wronged by someone else.

17. 4 Ethics of Care • Claims ethics need to be impartial • Emphasises preserving and nurturing concrete valuable relationships • Says we should care for those dependent on and related to us

18. 5 Virtue Ethics • An acquired disposition that is valued as part of the character of a morally good human being and that is exhibited in the person’s habitual behaviour. • We should exercise, exhibit, and develop the virtues • We should avoid exercising, exhibiting and developing vices • Institutions should instil virtues not virtues.

19. Ethics & Law • Ethics are moral principles or rules of conduct • Acting ethically is doing the “right thing” • Ethics are morally binding • Ethics arenot legally binding

20. Ethics in Business • Ethics are about moral and values. • Moral opinions are not opinions based only on the promotion of one’s self interest. Morals are impartial. • Moral opinions are action-guiding …… they are concerned with evaluating behaviour and with prescribing ways in which people should behave. To at least some extent, this requires that one think about the consequences of one’s actions. • Globalisation has raised some serious ethical dilemmas regarding the environment and employment matters. • Inevitably conflicts of interest need to be addressed. • It is increasingly being shown that doing business ethically is good for the bottom line, or for business generally in the long term.