Business Ethics & CSR

Introduction
Basic Concepts
Morality and Ethics
• Morality: Standards of right and wrong/Subject matter of Ethics

• Moral and Nonmoral Standards

• Ethics: Study of morality

• Normative vs. Descriptive study of morality

Business Ethics
• A specialized study of moral right and wrong that focuses on business
institutions, organizations, and activities
• Business ethics is applied Ethics: Analysis of moral norms and values
as well as application of the conclusions of this analysis
• Three kinds of issues
• Systemic
• Institutional or Corporate
• Individual
Objections to and Case for Business Ethics
• Business ethics should teach compliance
• But regulation and compliance are subjects of legal environment of business
• Ethical issues start where the law ends

• There is no use in trying to teach ethics at the college or graduate

level
• A variant of the above argument: business ethics cannot be taught as
long as business educators refuse to examine the ethical foundations
of their basic model
Objections to and Case for Business Ethics…
• Underlying the concerns is an unstated assumption: if we are going to allow
a business ethics course in our curriculum, we need to have assurances that
students who take the course will become better and more law-abiding
managers

• Clash of two cultures in colleges and schools of business

• Business schools have increasingly embraced the mathematic, scientific,
empirical model
• It has come at the expense of qualitative analysis and of the humanities

• Nature and role of education

 Ethical and Cultural Relativism
• The “right” way is the way which the ancestors used and which has
been handed down. . . . The notion of right is in the folk-ways. It is not
outside of them, of independent origin, and brought to test them. In
the folkways, whatever is, is right. This is because they are traditional,
and therefore contain in themselves the authority of the ancestral
ghosts. When we come to the folkways we are at the end of our
analysis.
 Ethical and Cultural Relativism…
• 1. Different societies have different moral codes.
• 2. The moral code of a society determines what is right within that society;
that is, if the moral code of a society says that a certain action is right, then
that action is right, at least within that society.
• 3. There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one society’s code
as better than another’s. There are no moral truths that hold for all people at
all times.
• 4. The moral code of our own society has no special status; it is but one
among many.
• 5. It is arrogant for us to judge other cultures. We should always be tolerant of
them.
 Consequences
• We could no longer say that the customs of other societies are
morally inferior to our own.
• We could no longer criticize the code of our own society
• The idea of moral progress is called into doubt