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Business Ethics andEnvironmental Management

Dr. Ameeta MotwaniOctober 2009

What is Ethics

Ethics

is the discipline that examines one's moral standards or themoral standards of a society. It asks how these standards apply toour lives and whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable—that is, whether they are supported by good reasonsor poor ones. Therefore, a person starts to do ethics when he or shetakes the moral standards absorbed from family, church, and friendsand asks: What do these standards imply for the situations in whichI find myself? Do these standards really make sense? What are thereasons for or against these standards? Why should I continue tobelieve in them? What can be said in their favor and what can besaid against them? Are they really reasonable for me to hold? Aretheir implications in this or that particular situation reasonable?The ultimate aim of ethics is to develop a body of moral standardsthat we feel are reasonable to hold—standards that we havethought about carefully and have decided are justified standards for us to accept and apply to the choices that fill our lives.

What is Business Ethics

Business ethics is a specialized study of right and wrong applied tobusiness policies, institutions, and behaviors. This is an important studysince businesses are some of the most influential institutions withinmodern society. Business organizations are the primary economicinstitutions through which people in modern societies carry on the tasksof producing and distributing goods and services. They provide thefundamental structures within which the members of society combinetheir scarce resources—land, labor, capital, and technology—into usablegoods, and they provide the channels through which these goods aredistributed in the form of consumer products, employee salaries,investors' return, and government taxes. Today large corporateorganizations dominate our economies. In 2003, General Motors, theworld's largest automobile company, had revenues of $195.6 billion andemployed more than 325,000 workers; Wal-Mart, the world's largestretailer, had sales of $258.7 billion and 1,400,000 employees; GeneralElectric, the world's largest maker of electrical equipment, had sales of $134 billion and 305,000 employees; and IBM, the world's largestcomputer company, had revenues of $89 billion and 319,000employees.'