Final Exam Essay: Business Ethics

Final Exam Essay: Business Ethics

Societies today mostly operate well due to the influence of large corporate bodies which carry activities that involve ethical scrutiny of businesses. Many companies in the modern world have succeeded because of their social, moral as well as sustainable competencies. When trying to consider the important idea of ethics in business, many corporations are thereby expected to satisfy so many ethical demands. This is mainly evident when so many company entities have gone global, with a primary aim of interacting with other cultures that will in turn enrich their ethical values. It is important to note that, there are so many issues that accompany business ethics which are in relation to financial as well as human resource management. It is thus a responsibility of the companies to hire appropriate employees, provide good working conditions, and engage in proper and ethical profit making activities as well as treating her employees in a reasonable manner.

There are a lot of ethical issues which are necessary for the needs of the business and which in-turn affects the effective operation of businesses. Therefore, for any business to achieve its ethical values there is need for it to involve all the stakeholders.

According to Kantian ethics, the decisions which are morally correct must always be accompanied by good intentions. According to his school of thought, for one to be considered to be having good intentions is for instance, a situation where a manager upholds the moral demands of the society. It is therefore, clear from the definition of business by Blackburn, that, they are units that need the ones operating them to consider consumers, their employees as well as the government expectations among others. (Blackburn, 2001) thus, for the ethical rules or an action taken by any business to be considered morally acceptable, there is need for all the stakeholders to have positive intentions. This in simple terms means the satisfaction of the expectations of all the groups involved in an organization because, contemporary legitimacy of corporate societies is not just drawn from the quality of the product and profits made alone, but from the company being considered to be morally ethical.

Another view of ethics according to our case is the utilitarian ethics. Here, for any action to be seen to be ethical in nature, it must be in a position to contribute towards a good outcome or if it makes proper use of utility. In the situation of a business context, the best result is one that considers the greater good of everyone from satisfying the employees, taking care of consumer satisfaction and also catering for the needs of the stakeholders of the business. As much as it is not easier to achieve all these situations in a company, it is however not true that these companies are unethical. As long as the company is geared towards making sure that all the stakeholders and the society are satisfied with its existence, it should be considered to be morally acceptable (Frederic, 2002).

Utilitarian point of view has been seen to be very hard to be achieved by the business men, however, as long as the demands of employees, society and the stakeholders are satisfied, there is no point of alarm since companies like Tesla have proven to have met it.

Because many companies set up are geared towards making profits which is the demands of the owners, thereby making their operation models to be unethical, the theory of ethical relativity states that, the moral validity is contextual by tying down the cultures of the people. Meaning, somebody will behave in a certain manner as compared to the demands of his or her lifestyle. This is different from businesses, which demand that their actions towards the people or the society should be morally acceptable and based on the ethical principles since they are multicultural in nature. Failure to observe that would mean that, those affected will identify the ethical loopholes and hence affect its operation and the primary goal (Mill, 1998).

It is paramount that the businesses set up should observe and respect the culture of the people so as to attain an ethical identity, failure to which they will be seen as not only unethical, but also immoral. There is need to avoid ethical egoism among the business people because it will only make the owner satisfied but the greater good, that is the society and employees to suffer and in return making it hard to attain its goals on ethics.

Many ethical and environmental theories have been developed because of the concern about the ethics to be observed by the business people. These theories mostly put their concern and protection on the rights of the people as well as that of the natural environment. So as to be safe from all these, it is important for the businesses to put into consideration, the need for conserving the environment and taking care of the needs of the people so as to be considered as being ethical. Since businesses have a lot of goals to achieve apart from those concerning the natural environment, there is need for them to consider only one aspect of, taking care of the African values that is seen to be very crucial in the community which the business operates. (Blackburn, 2001)

In summary, business ethics entails satisfying the moral demands of stakeholders of an organization. As compared to individual ethics, which means that one has to behave in a rightful position lest is faced by a consequence, business ethics tend to prove to the enterprises the need to get a proper ethical balance between different stakeholders who are essential in the running of an organization. This is the main contributor to the failing of the application of relativist ethics, which implies that all businesses should be focused towards satisfying the needs of the culture of a society that it operates in. this thus, puts businesses at a very bad position of trying to balance moral desires of the society and its objectives. Failure to observe ethical values has proven to have cost so many organizations in terms of their growth; hence, there is need for all the firms to work closely with the community and other stakeholders as well as observing proper moral values in their line of operation if indeed they have a goal making profits and growth.

References

Blackburn, S. (2001). Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Pres

Frederic, R. (2002). A Companion to Business Ethics. Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Mill, J. (1998). Utilitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press