Ethical Business

What is going to be talked about through this essay is whether business organisations in general can be ethical. With the amount of scandals happening within business organisations and the trust being put into accountants to produce financial statements, regardless of the financial situation of the business; whether the business is behaving in an ethical manner is a topic which will always be raised. According to most, all businesses would have to behave in an ethical manner otherwise they may fall apart. Whether they could be ethical or not is a controversial topic due to the fact that businesses are run by individuals and they do not run themselves.

Boatright claims,

‘‘Many ethical problems occur at the level of the organisation in the sense that the individual decision maker is acting on behalf of the organisation in bringing about some organisational change’’.

The person who does indeed run the business will definitely have his or her own opinion which will make that ethical for that company which could be seen as a disadvantage.   However, there is nonetheless an overall general consensus in business where certain ethical standards are abided to as he also states ‘‘being ethical in business is no different than being ethical in private life’’.

A clear definition has yet to be classified as many theorists have developed there own theories. According to ‘Wikipedia’ ethics is described as:

‘Ethics (from the Ancient Greek "ethikos", meaning "arising from habit"), a major branch of philosophy, is the study of value or quality. It covers the analysis and employment of concepts such as right, wrong, good, evil, and responsibility. It is divided into three primary areas: meta-ethics (the study of what ethicality is), normative ethics (the study of what ethical truths there are and how they are known), and applied ethics (the study of the use of ethical knowledge).’

The term ethical stated by Toffler, (1986) in Carroll & Gannon, (1997) means... [continues]

Read full essay