BUSINESS ETHICS

Introduction
Deadly Companies
These corporations, if they were individual human beings, would be
locked up for life. Instead, they continue raking in the big bucks.
Human rights abuses, murder, war, eco disasters, and animal
exploitation keep these companies raking in the green.
CHEVRON
Chevron
• Several big oil companies make this list, but Chevron deserves a special
place.
• Between 1972 to 1993, Chevron (then Texaco) discharged 18 billion gallons
of toxic water into the rain forests of Ecuador without any remediation,
destroying the livelihoods of local farmers and sickening indigenous
populations. Chevron has also done plenty of polluting in the U.S.
• In 1998, Richmond, California sued Chevron for illegally bypassing waste
water treatments and contaminating local water supplies, ditto in New
Hampshire in 2003.
• Chevron was responsible for the death of several Nigerians who protested
the company’s polluting, exploiting presence in the Nigerian
Delta. Chevron paid the local militia, known for its human rights abuses,
to squash the protests, and even supplied them with choppers and boats.
The military opened fire on the protesters, then burned their villages to
the ground.
DeBeers
DeBeers
• Diamonds are a girl’s best friend — unless she lives in the Ivory
Coast. Blood or Conflict Diamonds are the name given to minerals
purchased from insurgencies in war-torn countries. 
• Prior to 2000 when the U.N. finally took a stand against the
practice, DeBeers was knowingly funding violent guerrilla
movements in Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Congo with its
diamond purchases.
• In Botswana, DeBeers has been blamed for the “clearing” of land
to be mined for diamonds — including the forcible removal of
indigenous people who had lived there for thousands of years. The
government allegedly cut off the tribe’s water supplies,
threatened, tortured and even hanged resisters.
Tyson
TYSON
• Even if you don’t care about the horrendous animal abuse that has
been documented in Tyson’s factory farms, you have to flinch at
Tyson’s appalling environmental abuses and workers’ rights violations,
as well as the fact that on several occasions, Tyson has allowed e coli
tainted beef to enter the food supply.
• A recent study showed that Tyson’s chickens were the most
salmonella-and-campylobactor filled poultry of all the major suppliers.
• As if that wasn’t gross enough, Tyson has been sued repeatedly for
illegally dumping untreated wastewater into Tulsa’s water supply; after
they were sued the first time, they simply paid the fine and continued
the practice.
• Tyson has made people seriously ill with the ammonia from their
factory farms.
• Tyson is infamous for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and has even
been accused of human trafficking to supply themselves with cheap
labor.
Smith and Wesson
Smith and Wesson
• As the largest manufacturer of handguns (and sub machine
guns) in the U.S., Smith and Wesson is indirectly responsible
for uncountable shooting deaths — not just by the police and
government agencies to which these guns are issued, but by
criminals and by “accident.”
• In a study of the top ten guns involved in crime in the U.S., the
first was the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Numbers 6 and 7
were also Smith and Wessons. Statistically, studies have shown
that guns are used more often in crime than in self-defense.
• Of course, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” And
frequently, they use Smith and Wesson guns to do so.
Phillip Morris
Phillip Morris
• Phillip Morris is the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the U.S.
Cigarettes are known to cause cancer in smokers, as well as birth
defects in unborn children if the mother smokes while pregnant.
• Cigarette smoke contains 43 known carcinogens and over 4,000
chemicals, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen
cyanide, nicotine, ammonia and arsenic.
• Nicotine, the primary psychoactive chemical in tobacco, has been
shown to be psychologically addictive.
• Smoking raises blood pressure, affects the central nervous system, and
constricts the blood vessels.
• Discarded cigarette butts are a major pollutant as smokers routinely
toss their slow-to-degrade filters on the ground. Many of these filters
make their way into salt or fresh water bodies, where their chemicals
leech out into the water.
• Then again, cigarettes make you look cool.
COCA COLA
COCA COLA
• America’s favorite soft drink, deadly?
• Well, even if you choose to overlook the childhood obesity
epidemic and how soft drinks market to children to get them to
buy something really, really bad for them, Coca Cola
corporation has wrought devastation in India, where its
factories use up to one million liters of water per day, leaving
tens of thousands of nearby residents dry during the drought
months.
• Then the factories dispose of the wastewater improperly,
contaminating whatever water is left.
• A lawsuit in 2001 accused Coca Cola of hiring paramilitaries in
Columbia which suppressed unionization in the cola plant there
through intimidation, torture and murder
Pfizer
Pfizer
• Big Pharma gets rich when you get sick.
• Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., pleaded
guilty in 2009 to the largest health care fraud in U.S. history,
receiving the largest criminal penalty ever for illegally marketing
four of its drugs. It was Pfizer’s fourth such case.
• As if Pfizer’s massive use of animal experimentation wasn’t heart
wrenching enough, Pfizer decided to use Nigerian children as guinea
pigs. In 1996, Pfizer traveled to Kano, Nigeria to try out an
experimental antibiotic on third-world diseases such as measles,
cholera, and bacterial meningitis. They gave trovafloxacin to
approximately 200 children. Dozens of them died in the experiment,
while many others developed mental and physical deformities.
• According to the EPA, Pfizer can also proudly claim to be among the
top ten companies in America causing the most air pollution.
ExxonMobil
ExxonMobil
• Another oil company that makes the list, ExxonMobil is perhaps best
known for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill which resulted in 11 million
gallons of oil contaminating Prince William Sound. But they have also
been responsible for a huge oil spill in Brooklyn and for aiding in the
decline of Russia’s critically endangered grey whale because of drilling
in its habitat.
• The Political Economy Research Institute ranks ExxonMobil sixth
among corporations emitting airborne pollutants in the United States.
• ExxonMobil counters not by cleaning up its act, but by funding
scientific studies which refute global warming.
• ExxonMobil was targeted by human rights activists in 2001 when a
lawsuit alleged that ExxonMobil hired Indonesian military who raped,
tortured and murdered while serving as security at their plant in
Aceh.
Ringling Brothers and Barnum and
Bailey
Ringling Brothers and Barnum and
Bailey
• “The Cruelest Show on Earth” is famous for its abuse of wild
animals. In July 2004, Clyde, a young lion traveling with Ringling,
died in a poorly ventilated boxcar while the circus crossed the
Mojave Desert in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Circus elephants are routinely confined for days at a time and
beaten with bull hooks and electric prods, and when they’ve had
enough, they lash out.
• In one famous case in 1994, an elephant named Tyke killed her
trainer and injured 12 spectators before being gunned down on
the streets of Honolulu.
• Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus also has an
impressive dead human headcount because of a fire under the big
top in 1944 which killed a hundred spectators — the canvas was
illegally non-flame-retardant.
Monsanto
Monsanto
• Monsanto - pushers of genetically modified foods, bovine growth hormones,
and poison.
• Monsanto’s list of evils includes creating the “terminator” seed which creates
plants which never fruit or flower so that farmers must purchase them anew
yearly, lobbying to have “hormone-free” labels removed from the labels of milk
and infant milk replacer (through bovine growth hormone is believed to be a
cancer-accelerator) as well as a wide range of environmental and human
health violations associated with use of Monsanto’s poisons — most notably
“Agent Orange.”
• Between 1965 and 1972, Monsanto illegally dumped thousands of tons of
highly toxic waste in UK landfills. According to the Environment Agency the
chemicals were polluting groundwater and air 30 years after they were
dumped. Alabama sued Monsanto for 40 years of dumping mercury and PCB
into local creeks.
• Plus, Monsanto is infamous for sticking it to the very farmers it claims to be
helping, such as when it sued and jailed a farmer for saving seed from one
season’s crop to plant the next.
Nestle
Nestle
• Sticky-sweet image aside, Nestlé's crimes against man and nature
include massive deforestation in Borneo — the habitat of the critically
endangered orangutan — to grow palm oil, and buying milk from farms
illegally-seized by a despot in Zimbabwe.
• Nestle drew fire from environmentalists for its ridiculous claims that
bottled water is “eco-friendly” when the exact opposite is true. Nestle
attracted worldwide boycott efforts for urging mothers in third-world
countries to use their infant milk replacer instead of breastfeeding,
without warning them of the possible negative effects.
• Supposedly, Nestle hired women to dress as nurses to hand out free
infant formula, which was frequently mixed with contaminated water, or
the children starved when the formula ran out and their mothers could
not afford more and their breast milk had already dried up from disuse.
• Nestle, of course, denies contributing to the death of thousands of
infants.
‘There is no right way to do a
wrong thing.’
- Seneca, ancient Roman Philosopher
Meaning

• Greek word ‘Ethikos’

• Means ‘morality, showing moral
character’
• Ethics is the study of Behaviour
• What is Good and What is Wrong
• Branch of Philosophy
• Science of Morals
Meaning of Ethics

• ‘Ethics is the code of moral

standards by which people
judge the actions of
themselves and others.’
Difference
MORALS ETHICS
• Latin word ‘Moralis’ • Greek word ‘Ethikos’
• Social in Nature • Personal in Nature
• Based on Customs • Based on Personal
• Accepted by aspects
religious/cultural • Personally accepted
institutions • Personal principles(own)
• General • Wider scope
principles(Friends &
Family)
What are Moral Standards?
• Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner,
character, proper behavior") is the
differentiation of intentions, decisions, and
actions between those that are "good" (or
right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong).
• The philosophy of morality is ethics.
• (In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people
undertake when they seek to understand fundamental
truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and
their relationships to the world and to each other)
Can Ethics be Defined?
• ‘Ethics is not definable, is not
implementable, because it is not
conscious; it involves not only our
thinking, but also our feeling.’

• While every religion and every culture distinguishes

between right & wrong, the behaviors that are actually
considered to be right & wrong can vary widely. That is
why coming up with a universal definition of ethical
conduct is so challenging.
Branches of Ethics
• Descriptive Ethics: Descriptive ethics deals with what people
actually believe (or made to believe) to be right or wrong,
and accordingly holds up the human actions acceptable or
not acceptable or punishable under a custom or law.
• Normative Ethics: Normative Ethics deals with “norms” or
set of considerations how one should act.
• Meta Ethics: Meta Ethics or “analytical ethics” deals with
the origin of the ethical concepts themselves.
• Applied Ethics: Applied ethics deals with the philosophical
examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in
private and public life which are matters of moral judgment.
Nature of Ethics
• Standards of Behaviour; tells us how to
behave
• Not same as Feelings
• Feelings-Personal
• Ethics is not religion but it is advocated by
religion
• Ethics is not law but law contains ethics
• Vary from society to society
• Ethics is not science
Five Sources of Ethical Standards
• The Utilitarian Approach: Some ethicists emphasize that the ethical
action is the one that provides the most good or does the least harm, or,
to put it another way, produces the greatest balance of good over harm.
• The Rights Approach: Other philosophers and ethicists suggest that the
ethical action is the one that best protects and respects the moral rights
of those affected.
• The Fairness or Justice Approach: Aristotle and other Greek philosophers
have contributed the idea that all equals should be treated equally.
• The Common Good Approach: The Greek philosophers have also
contributed the notion that life in community is a good in itself and our
actions should contribute to that life.
• The Virtue Approach: A very ancient approach to ethics is that ethical
actions ought to be consistent with certain ideal virtues that provide for
the full development of our humanity.
Why be ethical?
• People have lots of reasons for being ethical:
• There is inner benefit. Virtue is its own reward.
• There is personal advantage. It is prudent to be
ethical. It’s good business.
• There is approval. Being ethical leads to self-
esteem, the admiration of loved ones and the
respect of peers.
• There is religion. Good behaviour can please or
help serve a deity.
• There is habit. Ethical actions can fit in with
upbringing or training
Why Business Ethics?
• Well publicized scandals resulted in public
outrage:
 Deception
 Fraud
 Lack of Corporate Governance
 Lack of Corporate Responsibility
Survey of Teens
• ‘Ethics of American Youth 2010’ – Josephson Institute Centre
for Youth Ethics 20th February 2011

89% Being an ethical person is better than

being rich
59% Admitted to cheating on a test within
last year
33% Admitted to using internet to
plagiarize an assignment

• ‘If today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, unethical

behaviour seems poised to become more common.
Trust in Business
(Edelman Trust Barometer Findings 2011)

80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Specific Issues
 Misuse of Company Resources
 Abusive Behaviour
 Harassment
 Accounting Fraud
 Conflict of Interest
 Defective products
 Bribery
 Employee theft
Agreed today:

• ‘The reputation of a Company has

a major effect on its relationship
with employees, investors,
customers, & many other parties.’
Agreed today:

• Integrity
• Objectivity
• Confidentiality
• Professional Competence & Due Care
• Professional Behaviour
 Employee
Commitment &
Trust

Investors Loyalty
Ethical Culture Profit
& Trust

Customer
Satisfaction &
Trust
Point to Ponder:

• CAN BUSINESS ETHICS BE TAUGHT?

• For now, this is enough. Thank you!