Business Ethics: Decision Making for Personal Integrity & Social Responsibility 4th Edition Test ban

In the second sense, "How should we live?" refers to how we live together in a community. This is a question about how a society and social institutions such as corporations ought to be structured and about how we ought to live together. This area is sometimes referred to as social ethics and it raises questions of justice, public policy, law, civic virtues, organizational structure, and political philosophy. In this sense, business ethics is concerned with how business institutions ought to be structured, about corporate social responsibility, and about making decisions that will impact many people other than the individual decision maker. This aspect of business ethics asks us to examine business institutions from a social rather than an individual perspective. This broader social aspect of ethics is referred to as decision making for social responsibility.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
AACSB: Ethics
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 01-03 Distinguish the ethics of personal integrity from the ethics of social responsibility.
Topic: Business Ethics as Personal Integrity and Social Responsibility
 
 
72. Why is "ethics" considered a normative discipline?
 
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.
AACSB: Ethics
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 01-04 Distinguish ethical norms and values from other business-related norms and values.
Topic: Business Ethics as Personal Integrity and Social Responsibility
 
 
73. Define values, and discuss the element of corporate culture in detail.
 
In general, values were earlier thought of as those beliefs that incline us to act or to choose one way rather than another.
A company's core values, for example, are those beliefs and principles that provide the ultimate guide in its decision making. Individuals can have their own personal values and, importantly, institutions also have values. 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 is that an individual 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.
AACSB: Ethics
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 01-04 Distinguish ethical norms and values from other business-related norms and values.
Topic: Business Ethics as Personal Integrity and Social Responsibility
 
 
74. Describe the two elements of ethical values.
 
First, ethical values serve the ends of human well-being. Acts and choices that aim to promote human welfare are acts and choices based on ethical values.


Second, the well-being promoted by ethical values is not a personal and selfish well-being. Ethical values are those beliefs and principles that impartially promote human well-being.
AACSB: Ethics
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 01-04 Distinguish ethical norms and values from other business-related norms and values.
Topic: Business Ethics as Personal Integrity and Social Responsibility
 
 
75. Discuss the impact of maintaining that holding to the law is sufficient to fulfill one's ethical duties, and what it says about the law itself.
 
Holding that obedience to the law is sufficient to fulfill one's ethical duties begs the question of whether or not the law itself is ethical. Examples from history, Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa being the most obvious, demonstrate that one's ethical responsibility may run counter to the law.


On a more practical level, this question can have significant implications in a global economy in which businesses operate in countries with legal systems different from those of their home country. For instance, some countries permit discrimination on the basis of gender; but businesses that choose to adopt such practices remain ethically accountable to their stakeholders for those decisions.
 
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
AACSB: Ethics
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 01-05 Distinguish legal responsibilities from ethical responsibilities.