Business ethics principles and applications

Ethics

There are several different ethical perspectives that one can take to evaluate the goodness of actions. Among the leading philosophies are virtue ethics, consequentialism, utilitarianism (a specific type of consequentialism) and Kantian ethics, specifically universal law. This paper will examine three scenarios in the workplace against these different ethical philosophies. The first scenario is an employee making long distance phone calls on the company dime; the second two employees having sex in the conference room after hours and the third is an employee who drinks excessively at lunch.

Personal Phone Calls

Among the schools of normative ethics, virtue ethics is the one that emphasizes moral character (Hursthouse, 2012). There are two basic ways to look at these phone calls from the virtue ethics perspective. From the employee's perspective, no moral person would steal, because theft is not a virtuous act. If stealing could ever be virtuous, there would need to be some underlying reason (stealing to feed your family, for example). No such underlying reason exists here. The theft, therefore, is not virtuous in nature. To look at this from the perspective of the employer, however, is a little bit less clear. The employer allowing its employees to make such phone calls would be acting in a virtuous manner, under one condition. The condition is that the company pays a fixed rate for its long distance service. In such a situation, the marginal cost of the phone calls to Russia is zero, and the employer would be providing a valuable service at no marginal cost to its employees, allowing them to stay in communication with their loved ones. Remember that corporations have obligations to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value, so only where there is zero marginal cost would such charity be virtuous. Where there is marginal cost, the cost is essentially an unauthorized transfer of wealth from the shareholders to the employee. For management to allow this would be unethical by the standards of virtue ethics.

By the standards of Kantian ethics, which rest on morality, there would need to be a prevailing moral standard, or categorical imperative, with respect to this sort of behavior (Johnson, 2008). The concept of duty plays into this, as this is important to Kant's theory. Both the employee and management have a duty to the company and by extension to its shareholders. Part of this duty is to safeguard the assets of the corporation. The money that the corporation pays for its long distance is one of those assets, but so too is the time that the employee is on the job. During this time, the employee is expected to perform work for the company, not engage in personal business. From both the perspective of the stolen long distance minutes and the stolen work hours, the employee has violated a categorical imperative rooted in our society.

The consequentialist will take the situation on balance, based on outcomes. The work hours might not be relevant if the employee gets all of his or her work done to a sufficient standard. The hours wasted on the phone might not have been relevant to the performance of his tasks. It is the responsibility of management to provide the employee with enough work to fill his day. However, if the employee's work suffers, then the consequences are negative. Further, the assets of the company are again an issue, because if the company is worse off for this action, that must be taken into account. The consequences here on productivity are likely to be negative, and more so if other employees take this employee's action as a cue to goof off themselves. From a utilitarian perspective, more beneficiaries (the employee's family, for example) must be taken into account, but the shareholders of the corporation are the greatest number so it is for their good that the employee is wrong to make long distance phone calls on personal time on the office phone.

Sexual Behavior

Virtue ethics tends to hold that the major moral flaw here is that the people are not married, since adultery is a selfish act that only harms others. Virtuous people do not focus their energies on selfish behavior, thus the act is wrong. Kantian ethics would not only point to prevailing moral codes against adultery, which are near-universal in human society, but against the use of the company boardroom as well. The company's prevailing code of ethics should set the standard here, and unless the company is Stratton Oakmont, in which case such behavior is accepted. In most companies, however, sex in the boardroom would violate the categorical imperative.

Consequentialist ethics would hold the consequences of the action to be the determinant of its morality. There are a lot of ways that this could play out. If nobody sees the act and it does not cause any disruption to anybody, then there is no moral prohibition against this act from the consequentialist perspective. Thus, context matters. If the employees are caught, and this leads to disorder in the company, or if their actions destroy pre-existing relationships, then by the consequentialist standard this act would be wrong. The utilitarian argument is going to be similar, except that because the benefits of the sex go to two people, it is highly unlikely that the balance of goodness will fall on the side of this being an ethical act. For that to happen, the act would have to produce a baby that grows up to make a great contribution to society. Odds are that won't happen.

Drinking

In virtue ethics, drinking is itself a neutral act. Virtue goes to deep levels far beyond habits (Hursthouse, 2012). As a result, the act of drinking is itself a neutral act, and it is only those acts which occur as the result of the drinking that can be negative under virtue ethics -- they must be evaluated on their own, however, as a distinct issue.