Ethical Dilemmas

Ethics defined is “How people try to live their lives according to a standard of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ behaviour” (Ghillyer, 2010, p.6), and Shaw, Barry, and Sansbury (2009, p.6) states the question “How are we to relate to each other in order to ensure that our individual and collective well-being is enhance?”. Ethics is crucial not only in personal and business but within our society and community, the business world is competitively brutal and without a set of ethics to follow it could be disastrous, not only for employees but employers as well. If a business has a sturdy set of ethical standards it could result in good business and good moral judgement in employees while dealing with customers and colleagues. Ethics gives individuals moral rules and codes of conduct, and facilitates us with answers to questions about what are right or wrong, duty, obligation and moral responsibility (Shaw et al, 2009, p.30). This essay is about ethics and the use of ethical elements of business decision making, which involves the moral standards and principles and how it affects the outcome of a decision, and to help give an ethical response to Alice’s case study, The Layoff.
In order for me to give the right advice to Alice to respond to her friend, I will firstly identify the moral standards and principles that should be applied, what the ethical dilemmas that Alice faces and the process for decision making. Then identify key ethical theories like, Consequentialist theories: Egoism, Utilitarianism, and Non-consequentialist theories: Kant, Ethic of Care and Virtue Ethics. Equipped with these theories, moral standards and principles, I should be able to go through the process and come to a reasonable ethical response and prove that Alice should keep the information confidential.

There are many characteristics to moral standards that Alice has to take into account when making a moral judgement, like someone’s action or behaviour, whether it is right or wrong and what