ETHICS AND SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOUR IN SOCIETY

BMG 101

BY
MRS MWONDELA – SUSIKU (MU-SBS LECTURER)
 UNIT 1: NATURE OF ETHICS

 Ethics, also known as moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about
morality – that is concepts, such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice, etc.
 Major branches of ethics are
 Meta-ethics: this is about the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions and how their truth-values may be
determined.
 Normative ethics – which is about the practical means of determining a moral course of action-that is what makes actions right
and wrong
 Applied ethics – this is about how moral outcomes can be achieved in specific situations-it attempts to apply ethical theory to
real-life situations.
 Moral psychology – which is about how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is.
 Descriptive ethics: which is about moral values that people actually live by.
 WHAT IS ETHICS?

 In contemporary usage, ethics deals with the question of what actions are morally right and with how things ought to
be.
 “Ethics” will be defined as that branch of philosophy that deals with values relating to human conduct, with
respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends
of such actions.
 Simply, ethics are said to be the code of moral principles that sets standards of good or bad, or right or wrong in
one’s conduct.
 ethics are the inner-guiding moral principles, values and beliefs that people use to analyze or interpret a situation
and then decide what is the “right” or appropriate way to behave.
 In practice, ethical behaviour is that which is accepted as “good” and “right” as opposed to “bad” or “wrong” in the
context of the governing moral code.
 WHAT IS MORALITY?

 Defined as the behavioural conduct that differentiates intentions, decisions and actions between those that are good (or
right) and those that are bad (or wrong).
 Morality consists of principles or rules of conduct that define standards for right behaviour.
 A moral code is a system of morality, for example according to a particular philosophy, religion, culture, etc.
 A moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code. Immorality is the active opposition to morality
 Morality has two principal meanings:
 In its “descriptive” sense, morality refers to personal or cultural values, codes of conduct or social morals that distinguish between
right and wrong in the human society. (refers only to what is considered right or wrong by an individual or a group of people)
 In its “normative” sense, morality refers directly to what is right and wrong regardless of specific individuals think.
 ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES

 The Utilitarian View:

 This view considers ethical behaviour in terms of whether it delivers the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
 The individualism View:
 This is based on the belief that one’s primary commitment is long-term advancement of self interests.
 The Moral-rights View:
 Ethical behaviour under this view is that which respects and protects the fundamental rights of people. For example to rights
of all people to life, liberty and fair treatment under the law are considered inviolate.
 The Justice View:
 This view of moral behaviour is based on the belief that ethical decisions treat people impartially and fairly, according to
legal rules and standards.
 This view evaluates the ethical aspects of any decision on the basis of whether it is “equitable” for everyone affected.
 ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES CONT.

 The Justice view is further subdivided into three types

 Procedural Justice: this involves the degree to which policies and rules are fairly administered. For example, does a sexual
harassment charge levied against a senior executive receive the same full hearing as one made against a first level supervisor
or junior employee?
 Distributive Justice: this involves the degree to which outcomes are allocated without respect to individual characteristics
based on ethnicity, race, gender, age, or other particularistic criteria.
 International Justice: this involves the degree to which others are treated with dignity and respect. For example, does a
bank loan officer take time to fully explain to an applicant why he/she was turned down for a loan?
What is the IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS? (For Student Study)
 UNIT 2: VALUES AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

 what are values?

 Dewey’s definition, indicating that values are meant to serve as guides or criteria for selecting good and desirable
behaviours.
 Kluckholm (1951) adds that “a value is not just a preference but it is a preference which is felt and/or considered
to be justified”.
 To this extent, we may talk about different levels of values: societal, group and individual values.
 These values are usually complimentary or reciprocal in nature though at times they may be in conflict.
 TYPES OF VALUES

 Terminal values are the preferences about desired ends, such as the goals one strives to achieve in life.
 Examples of these values considered important to managers include self-respect, family, security, freedom, inner harmony and
happiness.
 Instrumental values are preferences regarding the means for accomplishing these ends.
 Among instrumental values important to managers are honesty, ambition, courage, imagination, and selfdiscipline.
 Professional Values. Most professions take their basic professional values from societal values – that is from the
values held by the larger society in which they practice.
 Professional Ethics. They provide the guidance that enables a professional (HRM) to transform professional values into
professional practice activities
 Ethical principles do not describe professional practice but provide screens for assessing practice options for their rightness or
wrongness.
 ETHICS AND LAW
 Society can and does use the political and legal process
to lobby for and pass laws that specify what people can
and cannot do.
 Laws also specify what sanctions or punishments will
follow if those laws are broken.
 Once the law is passed, if you do not conform to the law,
you can be prosecuted; and if you are found guilty of
breaking the law, you can be punished. Unlike ethics.
 It is important to understand that neither laws nor ethics
are fixed principles, (which do not change over time)
 Ethical beliefs alter and change as time passes, and as
they do so, laws change to reflect the changing ethical
beliefs of a society.
 For example, It was seen as ethical, and it was legal, for
example, to acquire and own slaves in the ancient Rome and
Greece and in the United States until the 19th Century.
 ETHICS AND LAW CONT…

 It makes no sense that anything legal should be considered ethical, slavery for instance was once legal in the
United States and laws once permitted only men to vote.
 Is it truly ethical, for example, for an employee to take longer than necessary to do a job? (Or a student to
complete an assignment?), to make personal telephone calls on company time?, to call in sick so as to take a
day off for leisure? To fail to report rule violations by co-workers?
 None of these acts are strictly illegal, but many people would consider them unethical.
 Rather, most ethical problems in the workplace come about when people are asked to do or find they are about to
do something that violates their personal beliefs or values
 If the act is legal, they proceed with confidence. For others, the ethical test goes beyond the legality of an act
alone.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF LAW

 Law tells people what they can do and cannot do. The law informs them what is likely to happen if they are caught
doing something that is prohibited
 The crucial characteristics of law are that
 it is enacted by legislatures,
 interpreted by the courts,
 and enforced by the threat of punishment. (Its observance is held to be obligatory.)
 No matter how it is defined, law is of direct and immediate concern to human resource practitioners and other
professionals.
 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LAW AND ETHICS
LAW
 The observance of law is obligatory and is enforce by
the threat of punishment,
 Law is said to be definitive.
 Law is enacted by legislatures and can be changed by
subsequent enactments or legal interpretations
ETHICS
 Compliance with ethical principles is voluntary and
reinforced only by a moral respect to values
 ethics are often characterized by a sense of ambiguity
and indeterminacy
 Professional ethics may also be enforced by professional
sanctions, such sanctions may range from a simple
censure to cancellation of permission to practice
 Ethical rules, though do change over time, are generally
resistant to deliberate changes.
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS
 The real test of ethics occurs when you or anyone
encounters a situation that challenges personal ethical
beliefs and standards.
 Often ambiguous and unexpected, these ethical
challenges are inevitable and everyone has to be
prepared to deal with them, even students.
 For example, upon graduation, a student a student may get
a job offer and accept it, only to get a better offer two
weeks later. Is it right for the student to renege (break your
promise or work, or go back on your word) on the first job
to accept the second?
 A student knows that in a certain course his/her roommate
submitted an assignment paper downloaded or purchased
from the internet. Is it right for him/her not to tell the
instructor?
 One student tells another that a faculty member (lecturer)
promised her/him a high final grade in return for sexual or
financial favours. Is it right for him/her not to encourage
this student to inform the instructor’s department head?
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS CONT…
 These situation described above is an example of an ethical dilemma – that is the quandary people find
themselves in when they have to decide if they should act in a way that might help another person or group,
and is the “right” thing to do, even though doing so might go against their own self-interest.
 An ethical dilemma is a situation that requires a choice regarding a possible course of action that, although
offering the potential for personal or organizational benefit, or both, may be considered unethical.
 It is a situation in which action must be taken but for which there is no clear consensus on what is “right” and
“wrong”. The burden is on the individual to make good choices.
 Some problem areas and types of ethical dilemmas managers can get caught into include:
 Discrimination
 Sexual harassment
 Conflicts of interest
 Organizational resources
DEALING WITH ETHICAL DILEMMAS

 Step 1: Recognize the ethical dilemma

 Step 2: Get the facts
 Step 3: Identify your options
 Step 4: Test each option: Is it legal? Is it right? Is it
beneficial?
 Step 5: Decide which option to follow
 Step 6: Double – check with spotlight questions: e.g.
 “How will I feel if my family finds out about my
decision?”
 “How will I feel about this if my decision is reported in
the local newspaper?”
 Step 7: Take action
 RATIONALIZATIONS FOR UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR

 Why do otherwise reasonable people try to justify their unethical acts?

 Consider the possibility of being asked to place a bid for a business contract using insider information, paying bribes to
obtain the contract, falsifying expense account bills, etc. “How”, (should you), do “people explain doing things like this?”
 There are at least four common rationalizations that may be use to justify misconduct in these and other ethical
dilemmas:
 Convincing yourself that the behaviour is not really illegal
 Convincing yourself that the behaviour is in everyone’s best interests
 Convincing yourself that nobody will ever find out what you have done
 Convincing yourself that the organization will “protect” you.
 UNIT 3: ETHICAL DECISION MAKING APPROACHES

 Ethical decision making does not involve the automatic application of arbitrary rules. This so because “Ethics
cannot be summed up in a series of inviolate rules or commandments which can be applied everywhere and always
without regard to circumstances, thought of consequences, or comprehension of the ends to be attained”, Maclver
(1922).
 Rather, the professional Codes of Ethics and common sense provide them with sufficient guidance to cope with
many of these dilemmas, Beyerstein (1993).
 HR practitioners, however, do not face simple choices between one good option and one bad option.
 Instead, they face a multiple choices, each one of which contains both positive and negative features.
 But how does one know which option is “the most ethical?”
 Decisions about ethical questions usually follow an individual’s consistent behaviour patterns. Because such decisions
involve questions of right and wrong, they are deeply rooted in the values system that is most important to the decision
maker.
 APPROACHES TO ETHICAL DECISION MAKING

 Two theories that encompass most approaches to ethical decision making have been identified by modern
philosophers
 Ethical Relativism
 Ethical Absolutism
 Other comtemporary approaches to ethical decision making include:
 Clinical Pragmatism
 Humanistic Ethics
 Religious Ethics
 ETHICAL RELATIVISM
 Ethical relativists reject fixed moral rules.
 They, however, justify ethical decisions on the basis of the context or situations in which they are made or on the
basis of the consequences that result.
 There are two types of Ethical relativists:
 Ethical egoists: believe that one should always maximize what is good for oneself, no matter what the consequences for
others.
 Ethical utilitarians: argue that the most important thing is to seek the greatest good for the largest number of persons.
 Critique of the Ethical Relativism
 Some suggest that this approach to practice is very asocial and perhaps even amoral because it assumes that
individual satisfaction is the primary value.
 Others say that the only thing that matters with this approach is the result. If the result is the only thing that
matters, is there no difference when someone dies because an armed robber kills a by stander during a bank
holdup, or a soldier kills an enemy in combat, or one loses a job because they were framed of a crime?
 ETHICAL ABSOLUTISM

 Ethical absolutism stresses the overriding importance of fixed moral rules.

 Ethical Absolutists maintain that ethical rules can be formulated and that these should hold under all circumstances
 For example, they will argue that the rule “ an individual or professional shall tell truth to theclient” is always correct and
applies in every situation, no matter how much danger may be caused by telling the truth in any particular situation.
 Those who follow this theory are known as Deontologists.
 Based on this theory, therefore, one should not lie; one should always tell the truth whatever the circumstances
 UNIT 4: ETHICAL THEORIES AND ETHICAL TRADITIONS.

 Ethics is a form of practical reasoning in support of decision making about how we should lead our lives.
 “how should I live my life?
 An ethical theory is nothing more than an attempt to provide a systematic answer to the fundamental
ethical question: How should human beings live their lives?
 “It seems Right in Theory but Does It Work in Practice?

 Ethical theories are not comprised of one single principle or framework.

 Ethical theories evolve overtime and they have been refined and developed by many different thinkers.
UTILITARIANISM: MAKING DECISIONS BASED ON ETHICAL
CONSEQUENCES.

 Utilitarianism’s fundamental insight is that we should consider what to do by considering the consequences
of our actions.
 Better consequences are those that promote human well-being: the happiness, health, dignity, integrity,
freedom and respect of all people affected.
 A decision that promotes the greatest number of these values for the greatest number of people is the most
reasonable position from ethical point of view.
 Example! A case of child labour.
 Negative: children suffer physical and psychological harms , they are denied opportunity for education, their low pay
is not enough to escape a life of poverty, and so forth.
 What are the consequences if children in poor regions are denied factory jobs? These children would still be denied
opportunities for education, worse poverty and they have less money for food and family support.
 In many cases, the only alternative for obtaining income available for young children who are prohibited from joining
the work-force might include crime, drugs or prostitution.
 UTILITARIANISM AND BUSINESS

 (Tradition of Adam Smith) the claim that free markets competition are the best means for attaining
utilitarian goals.
 This version would promote policies that deregulate private industries, protect property rights allow for
free exchanges and encourage competition. (Administrative Version)

 A second influential version of utilitarianism policy turns to policy experts who can predict the outcome
of various policies and carry out policies that will attain utilitarian ends. (Market Version)
CHALLENGES TO UTILITARIAN ETHICS.
 DEONTOLOGY: AN ETHICS OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES

 It is important to recognise that some decisions should be a matter of principles and not consequences.
 Meaning that, the ends do not always justify the means but how do we know what principles we haveto
follow and how do we decide when a principle should trump beneficial consequences.
 What rules should we follow? Legal rules are one of major set of rules that we must follow.
 legal rules, organizational rules, role- based rules and professional rules.

 There will be very many occasions in which such role- based duty arise in business. As an employee,
one takes on certain role that creates duties. Every employee will have a set of rules that s/he is
expected to follow.
CHALLENGES TO ETHICS OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES
 VIRTUE ETHICS :MAKING DECISIONS BASED ON INTEGRITY
AND CHARACTER

 Virtue ethics is a tradition within philosophical ethics that seek to full and detailed description of those
character traits or virtues that could constitute a good and full human life.
 Virtues can be understood as those character traits that would constitute a meaningful human life.
 Being friendly and careful, having integrity, being honest, fourth right and faithful, having modest once and being
tolerant are some of the characteristics of a good and meaningful life.
 Early Christians describe three cardinal virtues of faith, hope and charity.
 Boy scouts pledge to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind obedient, cheerful, brave, clean and
reverent.
ETHICAL THEORIES SUMMARY
 ETHICS DECISION MAKING MODEL

 Determine the facts

 Identify ethical issues involved
 Identify stakeholders
 Consider the available alternatives
 Consider how the decision affects
stakeholders
 Guidance
 Assessment