Introduction to Business Ethics

The past few years have witnessed incredible, widespread, and monetarily overwhelming examples of business misconduct in the American business community. These failures in basic ethics, moreover, have unhappily coincided with widespread objections to our American culture being voiced by many people around the world. What may have developed in American business is basic greed and arrogance.

The concept of self-regulation as a technique for achieving a more desirable role for business in society is the expected outcome of business ethics. Students often do not recognize the relationship between the free market, ethics, and the law. Therefore, the law is probably most accurately regarded as a last resort after the market and self-regulation (ethics) have demonstrably failed. Therefore, ethics is not to be addressed in the abstract or as an afterthought. Rather, it should be at the start of all business practices.

Businesses organized in the United States are subject to its laws as well as the laws of other countries in which they operate. Business persons owe a duty to act ethically in the conduct of their affairs and owe a social responsibility not to harm society.

Ethics is considered to be a set of moral principles or values that governs the conduct of an individual or a group. What is considered to be lawful conduct is not always ethical conduct; in other words, the law may permit something that would be ethically wrong.

This lesson will describe the moral theories of ethics and the social responsibility the business has to its shareholders, corporate entity, and employees.