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Ethics in Business Environment

Introduction

Ethics in business environment or simply the business ethics is a kind of professional or applied ethics that deals with the observance of moral values and ethical principles and ethical problems that arise in business environment. Business ethics encompasses almost every aspect of business conduct and it also deals with the individual conduct in relation to the organization. The term business ethics has a broad application with both normative and descriptive dimensions; it normative in nature when pursued as career specialisation or corporate practice but it becomes descriptive when it is being learned and understood in academics. Today, the variety of ethical issues reflects the relation of profit-making and profit-maximising endeavours with non-commercial and non-economic concerns. Business ethics has attracted widespread interest in the late 20th century and now it is being pursued rigorously both in corporations and in academia. In today's world, most of the major corporations promote their dedication to non-commercial values such as social responsibilities and code of ethics (Shaw, 2008, pp. 311-326). In academia, too, the field has attained a status of a discipline and specialised courses are taught in business schools all around the world. Governments employ different rules and laws to direct businesses to operate in ethical manner and there also formal organisations for the promotion and implementation of ethical values in corporate world. Bu there are certain areas of business behaviour that lie beyond the control of governments and that are only regulated implicitly by ethics. The emergence of multinational and large business entities with limited or no concern for the societies in which they operate is one of the major reasons behind the development of various ethics regimes.

Business ethics echoes the core ideology or philosophy of corporations, which mainly determines the fundamental purpose the business. For example, if a corporation's stated purpose is to engage in such endeavours which ultimately result in maximisation of the shareholder's profit, then surrendering profits to other concerns is a considered to be a violation of its ethical responsibility. Milton Friedman notes that corporations' fundamental responsibility is maximise profits as much as possible while at the same time obeying the basic norms or rules of the society. The rules include those defined by the law and those emerged as ethical custom. Duska observes that business is expected to be ethical by the stakeholders; if there are no ethical obligations for business, there is a possibility of other institutions making the similar claims thereby resulting in complete chaos and counterproductively in the organisation. Some scholars suggest a slightly different but comprehensive approach; its entails business to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR implies that an ethical business should even sacrifice, if need arises, profits in order to fulfil its social and ethical responsibility toward the community in which it operates. All business organisations can be considered to be engaging in an unwritten and informal contract with the community in which they operate (Garrett, 1966, pp. 26-32). The society or community grant ...