Summary
Business Ethics 1 Summary
- Course
- 2013
- Institution
- University Of Cape Town (UCT)
This is a document that contains 12 weeks of work on Business Ethics 1. It is concise and comprehensive and ensures great success in this course!
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By: mthobisikwenzokuhle • 8 months ago
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Business EthicsPHI2043S
2012
Summaries
+
Lecture Slides
,W1: Intoduction: Summary 1
Merck and Company puts millions into researching and developing a human vision of the drug Invermectin, and
distribute it to the 3rd world societies living near water that were suffering from the ‘River Blindness’ disease.
Even though they would make no money off it, they felt that they were morally obligated to help these people, so
they did.
Handed drugs out for free and set up small distributing facilities.
Business Ethics = contradiction sometimes in term as there is an inherent conflict between ethics and self-
interested pursuit of profit.
Many businesses choose profits over ethics.
Although in the Merck and company = opposite
Unethical behaviour by companies = not a good long term business strategy
Ethical behaviour
o Best long term strategy for a company
o Costly though
o Very rarely rewarded
Unethical Behaviour = Not punished
Therefore Ethical Behaviour = tricky
Ethical course of action = Not always clear
Merck and Co felt ethical obligation to produce drugs, but they also have an ethical obligation to investors and
shareholders to make the company money.
Main purpose of this text = provide a deeper knowledge of the nature of ethical principles and concepts and an
understanding of how these apply to the ethical problems encountered in business.
4 preliminary topics:
o The nature of business ethics
o Moral reasoning
o The legitimacy of business ethics
o Moral responsibility
The Nature of Business Ethics
Feelings, Religion, Golden Rule = inadequate foundations for judging the ethics of business companies.
Personal Ethics = rules by which an individual lives their personal life.
Accounting Ethics = the code that guides the professional conduct of accountants.
Ethics (Does not equal) Morality
Ethics = Kind of investigation + includes both the activity of investigating as well as the results of that investigation.
Morality = the subject matter that ethics investigates.
We can define morality as the standards that an individual or a group has about what is right and wrong or good
and evil.
Example of Morality: Kermit Vandivier a Goodrich employee and the report he had to write about the aircraft
brakes. – Brakes were not good but the employer said he should write a good report anyway.
No writing report: good conscience but the risk of being fired or resign and thus no income.
Writing report: keep job and be able to provide for family.
Vandier beliefs (even though he chose to ignore this):
Right to tell the truth
Wrong to endanger lives of others
Integrity = good
Dishonesty = bad
, Moral standards = include the norms we have about the kinds of actions we believe are morally right or wrong as
well as the values we place on kinds of objects we believe are morally good or morally bad.
Moral norms = usually expressed as a general rules or statements: “Always tell the truth” etc.
Moral values = can usually be expressed as statements describing objects or features of objects that have worth.
Such as: ‘Honesty is good’ etc.
Person’s moral standards = first absorbed as a child from family, friends, school etc.
Person’s may revise these moral standards when they grow and mature.
Moral standards = often confused with non-moral standards, like the law.
Law = Judges LEGAL right and wrong.
When we make judgements about what things are good or bad, our judgements are based on standards of some
kind.
5 characteristics to pin down the nature of moral standards:
1. MS = deal with the matters that we think can seriously injure or benefit human beings.
2. MS = are not established or changed by the decisions particular authoritative bodies.
= Validity of MS rests on the adequacy of the reasons that are taken to support + justify them; so
long as these reasons are adequate, the standards remain valid.
3. MS = should be preferred to other values including self-interest. (i.e. person has moral obligation
to do something even if it conflicts with self-interest)
Not wrong to act on self interest. It is wrong to choose self interest over morality.
4. MS = based on impartial considerations.
“each counts for one, and none counts for more than one.’
5. MS = associated with special emotions and a special vocabulary act contrary to MS: I will feel
guilty, ashamed etc.
My Behaviour = immoral or wrong
Vandivier = later felt shame and remorse about what he did.
MS therefore = standards that deal with matters that we think are of serious consequence, are based on good
reasons and not authority, override self-interest, are based on impartial considerations, and whose transgression
is associated with feelings of guilt & shame & with special moral vocabulary. We absorb these standards as
children from a variety of influences & revise them as we mature.
Ethics = the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of society
When a person asks questions about his or her MS or about the MS of their society, the person has started to do
ethics.
Ethics = study of moral standards (which are supported by rest reasons)
Social sciences = engage in a descriptive study of ethics
Normative study = is an investigation that attempts to reach normative conclusions, i.e. conclusions about what
things are good or bad or about what actions are right or wrong. It aims to discover what should be.
Descriptive study = Attempts to describe/explain the world without reaching any conclusions, about whether the
world is as it should be.
Ethician = normative claims.
Anthropologist/ Sociologist = Descriptive claims.
Business Ethics = Particular field of ethics. Specialised study if moral right and wrong.
Institutions= relatively fixed patters of activity.
Most significant kind of modern business enterprises = Corporations.
Corporations = organs that the law endows with special legal rights and powers
BE = study of MS + how these apply to the system & organs through which modern societies produce and
distribute g’s & s’s, and to the people who work within these organs.
o Applied ethics
3 issues that BE investigates:
, o Systemic
o Corporate
o Individual
Systemic issues
o Questions raised about the economic, political and legal and other social systems within the business
operates.
o Questions about morality of capitalism, laws etc.
Corporate issues
o Ethical questions raised about a particular company.
o Questions about morality of acitivies, policies, practices, organisational structure of individual companies.
Individual issues
o Ethical questions raised about a particular individual, or individuals within the company
o Questions about morality of decisions, actions, or character of an individual.
Do Moral Standards apply to corporations or only to individuals?
Should people within corporate organisation be charged or the corporate organisation as a whole?
o “Corporations don’t commit crimes, people do.”
Organisations cannot act, except through human beings.
Therefore corporate act originate in the choices and actions of human individuals, it is these individuals who must
be seen as the primary bearers of moral duties and responsibilities.
Human individuals = responsible for what the corporation does, therefore actions flow wholly out of their choices
and behaviours.
The Human Individuals are the primary carriers of moral duties and responsibilities, they underlie the corporate
organisations.
Corporate policies, culture, norms, design impact greatly and influence decision making of a corporate employee,
yet these corporate artefacts do not make employees decisions and therefore are not responsible for their actions.
Do the same moral standards apply to Multinationals everywhere?
Ethical Relativism =
o The theory that because different societies have different ethical beliefs, there is no rational way of
determining whether an action is morally right or wrong other than asking whether the people of this or
that society believe it is morally right or wrong.
o No ethical standards that are absolutely true and that should be applied all over.
Relativism = holds that something is right for the people or companies in one particular society.
You must always allow for MS of a society if you are in that particular society.
Critics of ER = have pointed out that there are certain MS that members of any society must accept in order for
that society to survive and members can interact.
Ethical truth does not exist.
Moral Reasoning
Moral reasoning refers to the reasoning process by which human behaviour, institutions or policies are judged to
be in accordance with or in violation of MS.
Moral Reasoning involves 2 essential components.
o An understanding of what responsible MS require, prohibit, value and condemn.
o Evidence or info that shows a particular person, policy, institution, or behaviour has kinds of features that
these MS require, prohibit, value and condemn.
Factual info and MS = Often intertwined.
Analysing Moral Reasoning
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