Ethics and IB Summary Lectures
Week 1: Introduction to Ethics
What is business ethics?
The applied ethics discipline that addresses the moral features of commercial activity, the
study of what constitutes right and wrong, or good and bad, human conduct in a business
context.
- Theoretical component – concepts and principles
- Applied component – how to think about issues and what to do about them
(Judgement, empathy, imagination, reasoning)
Why is BE important?
- Business has a huge power in society
- Business can potentially provide major contribution to society
- Business malpractice can inflict enormous harm
- Demands placed on business are becoming more complex and challenging
- Employees may face pressure to compromise ethical standards
- Businesses face a trust deficit
Morality and ethics
- Morality is concerned with the norms, values, and beliefs embedded in social
processes which define right and wrong for an individual or a community.
- Moral standards concern behavior that seriously affects human well-being. They
take priority over other standards.
- Ethics is concerned with the study of morality and the application of reason to
elucidate specific rules and principles that determine right and wrong for any given
situation
- These rules + principles are called ethical theories
Types of Ethical Theory
Ethical theories provide the rules, principles and other concepts that help us to determine
what we should do (or not do) in a given situation.
- Normative ethics prescribes morally correct way of acting.
- Descriptive ethics describes how ethics decisions are actually made in business.
Morality and etiquette
- Etiquette: social norms governing conduct in a given society, but generally not seen as
having (much) moral weight, status
Morality and law
- Action can be legal, but not ethical – brokers are not legally required to act in their
customers’ best interest, even when they are advising them on their retirement money.
- Action can be ethical, but not legal – helping a Jewish family hide from the Nazis for
example was illegal.
- Legal doesn’t mean you must do it
- Ethical doesn’t mean you must do it
, - A right isn’t an obligation: you have a choice
There are four kinds of law:
- Statutes are laws enacted by legislative bodies. For example, the law that defines and
prohibits reckless driving on the highway is a statute.
- Administrative regulations – legislatures often set up boards or agencies whose
functions include issuing detailed regulations covering certain kinds of conduct.
- Common law – the body of judge-made law that first developed in the English-
speaking world centuries ago when there were few statutes.
- Constitutional law – court rulings on the requirements of the Constitution and the
constitutionality of legislation.
Professional codes are the rules that are supposed to govern the conduct of members of a
given profession. You should take seriously the code that governs your profession, but you
still have a responsibility to assess its rules for yourself.
For philosophers, the important issue is not where our moral principles came from, but
whether they can be justified.
Morality and religion
- Eutyphro dilemma (Plato)
- Moral issue? Then check the Ten Commandments (or any other religious source) =
Divine Command Theory
- Problem with DCT
Is action morally right because God/the gods say so?
Or does God/the gods say so because the action is morally right?
- Action is morally right because God/the gods say so
Unknown mechanism how this would work
Arbitrary principles and rules
Strange reasons for action
- God/the gods say so because the action is morally right
Morality is not specifically religious, there is another source of religion
The idea that morality must be based on religion can be interpreted in three different way,
none of which is very plausible.
- Although a desire to avoid hell and go to heaven may prompt some of us to act
morally, this isn’t the only reason that people behave morally – we often do it out of
habit or because that’s who we are.
- Moral instructions of the world’s great religions are general and imprecise: they do
not relieve us of the necessity of engaging in moral reasoning ourselves.
- Although some theologians advocated the divine command theory – that if
something is wrong, then the only reason it is wrong is that God commands us not to
do it but most philosophers would reject this view.
Conclusion: morality is not necessarily based on religion. Although we draw our moral
beliefs from many sources, for the philosophers the issue is whether those beliefs can be
justified.
