Business, Personal, Moral Ethics When We Know

Business, Personal, Moral Ethics

When we know something is right or wrong, good or bad, because of certain facts (not just preferences), we're confronting moral issues. Hurting people is wrong. Wanting vanilla ice cream is probably not, no matter that it may seem offensive to some of us sometimes. Social or cultural institutions that govern our personal principals are imposing moral standards that we can aim to achieve.

Business ethics, however, are different. They are operational guidelines and process expectations; and in many instances it is what one does to conform to this expectation that determines whether they are considered appropriate or not. The goodness or badness is business ethics is a much different issue, since even good business people can do bad things on purpose in search of bottom line profits and that is not necessarily seen as offensive.

When one basically blends these approaches and seeks to use certain standards or guidelines for one's own personal behaviors then business ethics can become personal ethics. There is often a good chance that personal ethics may be more closely related to moral expectations too because we often align our individual expectations with different ideas of what is good or bad.

But even these general classifications can change. Many people are now looking toward what are called double or triple bottom line beliefs. These approaches seek to balance social responsibility and monetary profitability, which means that they can come even closer to having business ethical elements and moral bases. Here are three examples:

MORALITY IN Business: Businesses sometimes do immoral things to make money. When they do, they violate even the strictest of cultural standards and could involve themselves in moral or criminal wrongdoing. If it turns out that PGE did more than fail to live up to good maintenance standards and actually neglected to take care of their California pipelines, maybe even profiting from lying about these efforts, they could well have committed a moral offense as individual executives or as a corporation. When this happens businesses violate moral rules.

Business ETHICS: The entire movement toward sustainable business standards is an excellent example of the changing nature of commercial expectations and how practices change. It is quickly becoming almost expected that companies in certain sectors (like energy) pay attention to the impact of their business on the planet. In the same way, many companies like Levis or the Gap often find themselves getting in trouble for violating rules about hiring young workers, underpaying workers or using false claims about how economically friendly their products are. Because of this, more businesses are beginning to see sustainability as the foundation for most business practices.