Business Ethics: Some Theoretical Issues

Valon Lluka

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Ethics can be defined as a process of evaluating actions according to moral principal of values. Throughout the centuries people were trying to choose between profit and moral. Perhaps, some of them obtain both, but every time it could have roused ethical issues. Those issues concern fairness, justice, rightness or wrongness; as a result it can only be resolved according to ethical standards. Setting the ethical standards for the way of doing business in corporation is primarily task of management. Corporations have to maintain the same standards as an individual person and, in addition, corporations, as organizational units, have their own social responsibilities toward customers, employees and society. However, any business should keep its original purpose of functioning - making profit. Balancing the traditional standards of profitability and burden of social responsibilities is not an easy task. In recent years it has been a trend of setting standards of corporate ethics according to high degree of morale. The central inquiry in this paper is to determine what difference it makes if businesses in a community act ethically or ignore ethics. Since business is the subject, our inquiry centers on money – a value highly appreciated in the U.S., as well as in varying degrees in other countries; ethics is often ignored when faced with the possibility of earning or acquiring large sums of money. The purpose of this paper is to examine ethics and the various ethical problems which business faces in the hope of increasing our understanding. To the extent knowledge is increased, if it appears that more ethical conduct is desirable, we will consider ways to develop more ethical conduct in business.

Keywords: Business ethics; profit; moral values; social responsibility; ethical issues; ethical standards; fairness; justice; rightness; wrongness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M1 M10 M14 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-08-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26716/1/MPRA_paper_26716.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:26716

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().