Business Ethics: Decision Making for Personal Integrity & Social Responsibility 5th Edition by Laura

 
A second approach to Enbridge, steps back from the facts of the situation to ask what should the manager do, what rights and responsibilities are involved? What good will come from this situation? Is Enbridge being fair, just, virtuous, kind, loyal, trustworthy?


This normative approach to business is at the center of business ethics.  Ethical decision making involves the basic categories, concepts, and language of ethics: shoulds, oughts, rights and responsibilities, goodness, fairness, justice, virtue, kindness, loyalty, trustworthiness, and honesty. 
 
*Chapter Objective 4 Addressed Below*


Ethics as Normative:  To say that ethics is a normative discipline is to say that it deals with norms, those standards of appropriate and proper (or “normal”) behavior.
 
Norms establish the guidelines or standards for determining what we should do, how we should act, what type of person we should be.


Norms appeal to certain values that would be promoted or attained by acting in a certain way.


Normative disciplines presuppose some underlying values.


What are Values? We can think of values as the underlying beliefs that incline us to act or to deicide one way rather than another.


A company’s core values are those beliefs and principles that provide the ultimate guide to its decision-making.


We can recognize many different types of values: financial, religious, legal, historical, nutritional, political, scientific, and aesthetic. Individuals can have their own personal values, and importantly, institutions also have values.


Talk of a corporation’s culture is a way of saying that a corporation has a set of identifiable values that establish the expectations for what is “normal” within that firm.


These norms guide employees, implicitly more often than not, to behave in ways that the firm values and finds worthy.


One important implication of this guidance, of course, is that an individual’s or a corporation’s set of values may lead to either ethical or unethical result. The corporate culture at Enron, for example, seems to have been committed to pushing the envelope of legality as far as possible in order to get away with as much as possible in pursuit of as much money as possible.


One way to distinguish these various types of values is in terms of the ends they serve.
 
Ethics Values versus Other Values:  How are ethical values to be distinguished from these other types of values? 


Ethical values serve the ends of human well-being.  Acts and decisions that seek to promote human welfare are acts and decisions based on ethical values. Controversy may arise when we try to specify more precisely that which is involved in human well-being.


The well-being promoted by ethical values is not a personal and selfish well-being. After all, the Enron and Madoff scandals resulted from many individuals seeking to promote their own well-being.


Ethics requires that the promotion of human well-being be done impartially. Ethical values are those beliefs and principles that impartially promote human well-being.
 
Ethics and the Law
 
*Chapter Objective 5 Addressed Below*
 
The law provides an important guide to ethical decision-making. Legal norms and ethical norms are not identical nor do they always agree. However, when new quandaries arise, one must be able to rely on ethics since the law might not yet – or might never – provide a solution.


Some ethical requirements, such as treating one’s employees with respect, are not legally required though they may be ethically warranted. 


Conversely, some actions that may be legally permitted, such as firing an employee for no reason, would fail many ethical standards.


Law as Social Responsibility: A commonly accepted view, perhaps more common prior to the scandals of recent years than after, holds that a business fulfills its social responsibility simply by obeying the law. 


From this perspective, an ethically responsible business decision is merely one that obeys the law; there is no responsibility to do anything further.


Individual businesses may decide to go beyond the legal minimum, but these choices are voluntary and a matter of corporate philanthropy and charity. 


Ethics Programs and Officers.  Over the last decade, many corporations have established ethics programs and have hired ethics officers who are charged with managing corporate ethics programs.


Ethics officers do a great deal of good and effective work, but it is fair to say that much of their work focuses on compliance issues.