Ethics and Social Responsibility

1. “Ethics has no place in business.” Discuss this statement.

Frequently many people pronounce the said “business is business”, showing a slight taste of immorality, where business are purely economic and ethics has no place in business, but is very important to know that ethics is essential component of a company. Ethics demand that the most important consideration is the people. Unethical act has a high risk. Every business leader should know that corporate reputation and building trust are closely related to honesty, transparency service quality and corporate responsibility.

2. Define the following concepts: moral standards, non-moral standards, ethics, business ethics, globalization, diffusion of responsibility and moral reasoning.

* Moral Standards: The norms about the kinds of actions believed to be morally right and wrong as well as the values placed on what we believe to be morally good and morally bad. * Nonmoral Standards: The standards by which we judge what is good or bad and right or wrong in a nonmoral way. * Ethics: The discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society to evaluate their reasonableness and their implications for one’s life. * Business ethics: A specialized study of moral right and wrong that concentrate on moral standards as they apply to business institutions, organizations and behavior. * Business ethics: A specialized study of moral right and wrong that concentrate on moral standards as they apply to business institutions, organizations and behavior. * Globalization: The worldwide process by which economic and social systems of nations have become connected facilitating between them the flow of goods, money, culture, and people. * Diffusion of responsibility: In simple words, as are most people, unless they commit. A larger group of people watching a fact will be less commitment to help, but there are few observers, chances are you have better support. * Moral reasoning: The reasoning process by which human behaviors, institutions, or policies are judged to be in accordance with or in violation of moral standards.

3. Define the following concepts: utilitarianism, utility, legal rights, contractual rights, distributive justice, ethics of virtue, and capitalist justice.

* Utilitarianism: A general term of any view that holds that actions and policies should be evaluated on the basis of the benefits and costs they will impose on society. * Utility: The inclusive term used to refer to any net benefits produced by an action. * Legal rights: An entitlement that derives from a legal system that permits or empowers a person to act in a specified way or that requires others to act in certain ways toward that person. * Contractual Rights: The limited rights and correlatives duties that arise when one person enters an agreement with another person. * Distributive justice: Arrangement where goods or services are apportioned by an authority (a government agency, for example) on the basis of a commonly accepted standard, such as the number of hours worked by an individual. Requires distributing society’s benefits and burdens fairly. * Virtue Ethics: Virtue Ethics is a classification within Normative Ethics that attempts to discover and classify what might be deemed of moral character, and to apply the moral character as a base for one’s choices and actions. * Capitalist Justice: Is the justice based on contribution, and it establishes that the benefits should be distributed according to the value of the contribution the individual makes to a society, a task, a group, or an exchange.

4. Does utilitarianism provide a more objective standard for determining right and wrong than moral rights do? Explain your answer fully.

Utilitarianism does not provide a more objective standard for determining right and wrong than moral rights do, because it can, mistakenly, lead to believe that “The end justifies the means”. If any valid end can justify the means to achieve it, you do not have a real ethical foundation. A specific action cannot be judged as good simply because it can lead to a good result.