The Nature of Morality

Chapter 1
EHTICS

 Ethics comes from the Greek word “ethos” meaning character or customs
 According to “The American ethos” or “The Business ethos” we use the word ethos to refer to the
distinguish disposition, character, altitude of specific people, culture or group
 According to Solomon, the etymology of ethics suggests its basic concerns
 Individual character, including what it means to be “a good person”
 The social rules that governs and limit our conduct
 Difference between Ethics and Morality
 Morality refers to human conduct and values while ethics refers to study of those areas
EHTICS

 Business and Organizational Ethics:

Business ethics is the study of what constitutes right and wrong, or good and bad, human conduct in
business context. See examples in book
Business: Any organization whose objective is to provide goods and services for profit
Business Persons: They are those who participate in planning, organizing or directing the work of business
Organization: It is a group of people working together to achieve a common purpose

 Personal and Business Ethics:

The intimacy between ethics in general and ethics as applied to business contexts implies that one’s personal
ethics cannot be neatly divorced from one’s organizational ethics
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

 What falls outside the sphere of Morality is Non-Morality Standards

 Moral standards are different because they concern behavior that is of serious consequence to
human welfare, that can profoundly injure or benefit peoples
 The conventional moral norms against lying, stealing and murdering deals with actions that can
hurt people. And the moral principle that human beings should be treated with dignity and respect
uplifts the human personality.
 Moral Standards
 Moral standards are different because they concern behavior that is of serious consequences to human
welfare, that can be profoundly injure or benefit peoples
 Moral standards take priority over other standards, including self interest
 Their soundness depends on the adequacy of the reasons that support or justify them
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

 Morality and Etiquettes

 Morality and Law
 Professional Codes
 Where do Moral Standards come from ?
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

Morality and Etiquettes:

 Etiquettes refers to any special code of behavior or courtesy e.g. It is usually considered bad
etiquettes to chew with one’s mouth open
 If we violate the rules of etiquettes that we have read in the books then we rightly considered as ill-
mannered, impolite or even un-civilized but not necessary immoral
 Rules of etiquettes are generally non moral in nature: “Push your chair back into place upon leaving
a dinner table.“ But violation of etiquette can have moral implications . The male boss who refers to
female subordinates as “honey” or “doll” shows bad manners
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

Morality and Law:

 Before understanding law we should have know that there are four kinds of law: statutes, regulations,
common law and constitutional law
 STATUTES: The law which is enacted by legislative bodies e.g. The law that prohibit theft is a statutes.
Statutes make up a large part of the law and are what many of us mean when we speak of laws
 REGULATIONS: Limited in their knowledge legislatures often set up boards or agencies whose functions
include issuing detailed regulations of certain kind of conduct – Administrative Regulations
 COMMON LAW: It refers to law applied in the English speaking world when there were few statutes.
Courts frequently wrote opinions explaining the bases of their decision in specific cases, including the
legal principles they deemed appropriate. Each of these opinion became a precedent for later decisions in
similar cases
 CONSITITUTIONAL LAW: It refers to court rulings on the constitutionality of any law.
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

Peoples sometimes confused legality and morality, but they are different things. On one hand, breaking law
is not always or necessarily immoral. On the other hand, the legality of an action does not guarantee that it
is morally right.
 An action can be illegal but morally right e.g. Helping a Jewish family to hide from the Nazis was against German
Law 1939, but it would have been a morally admirable thing to have done
 An action that is legal can be morally wrong e.g. It may have been perfectly legal for the chairman of a profitable
company to layoff 125 workers and use three- quarters of the money saved to boost his pay and that of the
company’s other top manager, but morality of his doing is so open to debate
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

Professional Codes:
 Somewhere between etiquettes and law lies professional codes of ethics. These are the rules that
are supposed to govern the conduct of members of a given profession. Generally speaking, the
members of a profession are understood to have agreed to abide by those rules as a condition of
their engaging in that profession.
MORAL VS NON-MORAL STANDARDS

Where do Moral Standards come from ?

 Morals come from issues taught and passed down from person to person. However the original is
based on the religious beliefs of the person sharing the moral. In short all morals come from
Religion. Without religion, all things are possible and no morals are required.
RELIGION & MORALITY

Morality Need not Rest on Religion

 Many people believe that morality must be based on religion, either in the sense that without
religion people would have no incentive to be moral or in the sense that only religion can provide
moral guidance. Others contend that morality is based on the commands of God. None of these
claims is very plausible.
ETHICAL RELATIVISM

 Ethical Relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one's culture. That is,
whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The
same action may be morally right in one society but be morally wrong in another
 Relativism and the “Game” of Business
Albert Carr in a essay “Is Business Bluffing Ethical” argues that a business, as practiced by individuals as
well as corporations, has the impersonal character of a game – a game that demands both special strategy
and an understanding of its special ethical standards. Business has its own norms and rules that differs from
those of the rest of society. Thus according to Carr, a number of things that we normally think of as wrong are
really permissible in a business context e.g. conscious misstatement and concealment of pertinent facts in
negotiations, lying about one’s age on a resume, deceptive packaging, automobile companies’ neglect of car
safety and utility companies’ manipulation of regulators and over changing of electricity users.
HAVING MORAL PRINCIPLES

 Conscience:
 The inner sense of what is right or wrong in one's conduct or motives,
impelling one toward right action:
 the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the
actions or thoughts of an individual

 The Limit of Conscience

 Moral Principles and Self- Interest
ASSIGNMENT NO. 1
MORALITY & PERSONAL VALUES
INDIVIDUAL INTEGRITY & RESPONSIBILTY

 The Individual Inside the Corporation

 Organizational Norms
 Conformity
 Bystander Apathy