Chapter 1 - BUSINESS ETHICS NOTES

What does doing ethics mean?

 Deliberating about the rightness or wrongness of actions
 Examining the soundness of your (and other people’s) moral outlook
 Questioning whether your moral decision making rests on coherent supporting
considerations
 
 
 
 
The questions of Ethics?
 What is the greatest good?
 What goals should I pursue?
 What virtues should I cultivate?
 What duties should I fulfill?
 What value should I put on human life?
 How important is it to pursue happiness, do justice, and respect rigt
 
 
Loss of personal freedom
 You lose personal freedom when you don’t exercise your
autonomy
 Confused or mistaken views
 You may be susceptible to ideas that appear clever but are actually the result of faulty
reasoning
 Stunted intellectual and moral growth
 If you don’t exercise the skills of critical thinking, they will be weak
Elements of Ethics
 Reason: Ethics involves, even requires, critical reasoning.
 Absolutism: the view that there is a universally correct moral position
In contrast,
 Relativism: the view that moral values are relative to particular environments; moral
behaviors are dependent on the particular culture, society, or environment in which they
take place (“When in Rome, do as the Romans do")
 
Moral Pluralism
the view that there is no single moral theory or principle that should be accepted as preferable to
others; different, diverse, and even mutually inconsistent ethical positions should be recognized
and considered reasonable
 
From moral Pluralism to Ethical Defeat
 
Mistaken inference 1
 From the fact of cultural difference, it follows that there are no universal ethics
 However, there are some ethics that appear to have universal appeal.
 Eg. Torture is wrong.
Mistaken inference 2
 From the fact that there are exceptions to rules in practice, it follows that there are no
universal ethical rules
 However, exceptions do not negate rules
Descriptive and Prescriptive Ethics
 Prescriptive: theories that allow for the judgment of an act as right or wrong;
recommending and forbidding certain types of conduct
 Descriptive: the non-judgmental empirical study of ethics in particular groups or
societies
o These theories are easily confused when it is believed that how things are done is
the way they should be done