Intentional and unintentional misuse of funds in nonprofit organizations

Business Ethics

Virginia Held is a unique feminist philosopher her focuses her work on how fundamental feminist ideals differ from the more traditional, masculine-based feminist philosophy. Virginia Held is a feminist philosopher, but her general theory of feminism differs greatly from more traditional feminist theorist, especially as to her perspective on women in society. Whereas most traditional feminist theorists take a masculine approach to feminism and thus do not consider such things as love, caring and emotion as being uniquely female traits, Virginia Held accepts these traits as being female. As such, Ms. Held refuses to "belittle these traits when explaining human morality and behavior." Instead of taking the traditional feminist stand of "females can do anything a male can do," Ms. Held recognizes the unique differences between men and women.

Held argues that other feminist actually do a disservice to females by ignoring these important, unique feminine traits. According to Held, morality and human identity have been "programmed with a male bias." It is this male bias that has caused masculine traits to be elevated and thus traditionally feminine traits to be held in scorn. Whereas traditional feminists tend to argue that masculine traits are fundamentally more important and thus should also be attributed to females instead of denied, Held argues that traditional feminine traits are equally as important and should be viewed as being so.

In general, business ethics is the field that examines what type of ethical rules and theories should govern the way a business is conducted. It is the adopted business ethics of a society that determines how a moral or ethical dilemma that arises in the workplace is handled. When evaluating business ethics, numerous ethical and theoretical backgrounds come into play. One of these theories is a feminist approach to business ethics.

Once can argue that a leading cause of the ethical dilemmas found in the nation's corporate society, those that lead to such public scandals as WorldCom and Enron, to name a few, is because traditionally masculine traits control the way business is done. For example, such masculine traits as competition, risk taking and an all-business attitude is what currently defines corporate culture. However, these masculine traits remove the person from the job, which creates a riff between one's personal life and one's business life. This riff thus separates one's personal ethics from the ethics that govern their actions at work. Therefore, when one is faced with an ethical dilemma in the workplace, they can easily approach it from a non-ethical point-of-view, which in turn leads to corporation and the previously mentioned scandals.

Feminist theory, on the other hand, has traditionally approached the realm of business ethics with the argument that females are as capable as men in performing in the corporate world. Thus, such arguments as breaking the glass ceiling and placing females in executive positions have been the focus of feminists when it comes to business ethics. In other words, the focus of feminist has been on creating an ethics of equality in the workplace, or showing that females are also capable of possessing these so called masculine traits. However, this approach, although having made great strides in terms of getting females in leadership roles in the workplace, has done nothing to solve the ethical issue that causes the previously mentioned scandals.