Business Ethics and its Issues

“What does ethical principles mean to you?”

Ethics is what my feelings tell me is right. But this is not a fixed standard, and that makes problems.

Ethics means accepted standards in terms of your personal and social welfare

How can you tell who is right then?”

50 per cent defined ethics as “what my feelings tell me is right,” 25 per cent defined it in religious terms as what is “in accord with my religious beliefs,” and 18 per cent defined it as what “conforms to the golden rule.

What then do ethics and ethical principles mean?

1) “The principles of conduct governing an individual or

a group.”

2) “The study of the general nature of moral choices to

be made by a person.

3) “The rules or standards governing the conduct of a

person or the members of a profession e.g. auditing

ethics, medical ethics”.

A more important meaning of ethics according

to the dictionary is this: Ethics is “the study of

morality.”

So then, what, is morality?

We can define morality as the standards that an individual or

a group has about what is right and wrong, or good and evil.

Moral standards include the norms we have about the kinds of actions we believe are morally right and

wrong as well as the values we place on the kinds of actions we believe are morally good and morally bad.

Where do these standards come from?

Typically, a person’s moral standards are first imbibed as a child from family, friends and various societal

influences such as church, Mosque, school, television, magazines, music and associations.

Later, as the person grows up, experience, learning and intellectual development may lead the maturing

person to revise these standards. Some are discarded and new ones may be adopted to replace them.

Through this maturing process, the person may develop standards that are more intellectually adequate

and so more suited for dealing with the moral dilemmas of adult life.

What are the characteristics that distinguish moral standards

from standards that are not moral?

This is not an easy question to answer. However, ethicists have suggested five characteristics that help to

pin down the nature of moral standards.

First, moral standards deal with matters that we think can seriously injure or seriously benefit human

beings. For example, most people in Nigerian society hold moral standards against theft, rape,

enslavement, murder, child abuse, assault, slander, fraud, law-breaking, and so on. All these plainly deal

with matters that people feel are quite serious forms of injury.

Second, moral standards are not established or changed by the decisions of particular authoritative

bodies. Laws and legal standards are established by the authority of a legislature or the decisions of

voters. Moral standards, however, are not established by any authority, nor does their validity rest on

voting procedures. Instead, the validity of moral standards rests on the adequacy of the reasons that

are taken to support and justify them; so long as these reasons are adequate, the standards remain

valid.

Third, and perhaps most striking, we feel that moral standards should be preferred to other values

including (especially) self-interest. That is, if a person has a moral obligation to do something, then he or

she is supposed to do it even if this conflicts with other, non-moral values or self-interest.

Fourth, and generally, moral standards are based on impartial considerations. The fact that you will

benefit from a lie and that I will be harmed is irrelevant to whether lying is morally wrong or not. Recent

philosophers have expressed this point by saying that moral standards are based on “the moral point of

view” that is, a point of view that does not evaluate standards according to whether they advance the

interests of a particular individual or group, but one that goes beyond personal interests to a “universal”

standpoint in which everyone’s interests are impartially counted as equal.

Last, moral standards are associated with special emotions and a special vocabulary. For example, if I act

contrary to a moral standard, I will normally feel guilty, ashamed, or remorseful; I will characterise my

behaviour as “immoral” or “wrong” and I will feel bad about myself and experience loss of self-esteem.

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