University Of St. Thomas
Ethic is a code of conduct put forward by society that is accepted by all rational adult individual beyond the boundary of country or culture or religion. For example, entry into many social groups (a third-level priority) require an individual to undergo an initiation that poses an immediate threat to their well-being (a first-level priority). As trade and commerce have expanded relentlessly throughout the ages, business orientated legislation has also grown exponentially beyond the basics of property ownership, taxation and theft. In the end, this may well be a case where the corporations need to trust the experts, or the bulk of them, and at very least lend their weight to the argument in favour of giving the Summer Olympics a very serious second look.
For instance, a small business owner may have his or her decision affect his or her customer base as well as his or her employee base. Ethical theory, including virtue theory and Kantian deontology, is useful for thinking about how individuals should relate to each other in the context of business (cf. What ascribing agency and responsibility to firms enables us to do, according to Hasnas, is blame and punish them.
In such an instance, ethics is not primarily concerned with the satisfaction of the need for the actor (to eat being neutral), but with the actions undertaken in obtaining food, insofar as they affect other parties. Considered only as a normative enterprise, business ethics—like many areas of applied ethics—draws from a variety of disciplines, including ethics, political philosophy, economics, psychology, law, and public policy.
It was suggested that, when considering the ethics of consequences , that there is limited value in considering the consequences of past actions, except as a method of deriving guidance, from experience, for making decisions that will have consequences in the future. Elements of moral Responsibility are individual must cause or fail to prevent an avoidable injury or wrong, individual must know what he is doing, individual must act of his own free will.
Nigel: Setting aside the mafia because there are special problems there about identifying who’s a member; but think of Shell, you can find business addresses, you can find the names of employees, I don’t follow why there’s a problem about identifying where the corporation is there. That is not to say that there is no point in analyzing pas actions: while the past cannot be changed, the lessons taken from it provide guidance for future decisions, which is the value of ethics. Such a perspective makes ethics moot, and as such must be considered of no value to ethics.