Business Ethics
What is Business Ethics?
Business ethics is concerned primarily with the relationship of business goals and technology to specifically human ends. It studies the impact of act of good on individual, the firm, the business community and society as a whole. Business ethics studies the special obligation which a person and a citizen accept when he or she becomes a part of the world of commerce.
Ethics refers to a process of reasoning which enables one to make better sense of “who is harmed and who is benefited by each alternative, whose rights are protected and whose violated”.
Issues in Teaching Business Ethics:
Through it is challenging to put business ethics into practice especially when the wider environment seems to reward unethical business practice such as bribery and nepotism, the challenge for both education and management is still to learn how to cope with these challenges.
The question of teaching anything be it ethics or electronics – involves two issue among other things, and they are:- What to teach (which also involves questions of what is the best way of teaching a particular subject in order to function of teaching realize it’s end).
There are two modes of teaching business ethics:-
- Principle based model
- Virtual based model
In principle based model, principle of business ethics are explained.
In virtual based model of teaching of business ethics, the emphasis is on looking at the company as a virtue seeking – being struggling to create an ethics for itself and gain a distinct character.
Ethical Issue to be Taught:
A concern with ethics can help us see that in each area of business and management there is an ethical dimension which needs to be addressed.
We must know that the business corporation, like any other social environment. IT creates a moral ecology shaping countless types of teachers we must assist our students in analyzing both, deceptively and normatively the institutional ethics to the business organizations. This is one way of addressing the transferability of learning to the business context. Whether describing or prescribing, we must be able to identify ethical dimensions of corporate strategy, policy and decision making.
In the language of virtue ethics, we might say that a company implicitly or explicitly decides what kind of company it intends to be? It creates a from of character for itself and its employees and expects certain kind of behaviour to flow from such a character.
If we reemphasize the basic social values such as love, kindness, honestly, integrity, uprightness, social responsibility, etc. we would be certainly on the right track.
The question is how to regain these values on the lost paradise? The simple solution to this problem is to make ethics and values and integral part of management education.
Students need the philosophical perspective as a base to develop this thinking process and strategy for dealing with ethical issues. They also need a wide variety of cases, including executive level cases, in which to test own values and develop and understanding of the ethical dimensions of business decisions.
