Business Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz

Chapter 12, the last applied ethics chapter, considers some controversies in business. How should a firm’s owners, and related agents such as managers or state bank directors, engage with others, particularly workers and consumers? The chapter argues that the communal ethic does a better job of accounting for intuitions about who counts as a stakeholder and how to prioritize amongst competing stakeholder interests than does utilitarianism or Kantianism. Roughly, rightness as friendliness entails that not all duties of beneficence are a function of need or voluntary assumption of obligation to aid; a firm can also have pro tanto moral reason to help parties because it has related on friendly terms with them in the past. The chapter also takes up the question of how the production process ought to be structured, arguing that while the Western moral theories could well allow an unconstrained managerialism, the communal ethic probably does not.

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Heath ◽  
Jeffrey Moriarty ◽  
Wayne Norman

ABSTRACT:There is considerable overlap between the interests of business ethicists and those of political philosophers. Questions about the moral justifiability of the capitalist system, the basis of property rights, and the problem of inequality in the distribution of income have been of central importance in both fields. However, political philosophers have developed, especially over the past four decades, a set of tools and concepts for addressing these questions that are in many ways quite distinctive. Most business ethicists, on the other hand, consider their field to be primarily a domain of applied ethics, and so adopt methods and conceptual frameworks developed by moral philosophers. In this paper, we discuss some of the salient differences between these two approaches, and suggest some ways in which business ethicists could benefit from taking a more “political philosophy” approach to these questions. Throughout, we underline the importance of seeking greater compatibility among the principles used in normative theorizing about markets, regulations, corporate governance, and business practices.


Technology united with research and development has evolved as a grave differentiator of the agriculture sector in India including production, processing, and agriculture packing and marketing of given crops. Near about 50 percent of the Indian workforce was engaged in the agriculture sector but its share in GDP was only 14 percent, much lower in comparison to former. Though, certain agriculture items showed a steady annual increase in terms of kilograms per hectare. Agriculture transformed significantly over the past few decades but when it comes to investment in research and development there is a lot more which needs to be done. The paper analyzes the role of various research and development institutions in boosting the growth of the agriculture sector that helps in attaining sustainable agriculture development and self-sufficiency in the production process since independence. It also focusesed on the various issues faced by these development institutions. The findings unveiled that since independence a lot more was done to boost the research and development in the agriculture sector at both the center and state levels but a proper implementation of these policies along with transparency could bring more desirable outcomes than were gained at present.


1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Beattie ◽  
Stassen Thompson ◽  
Michael Boehlje

The product-product relationship has been a traditional subject of most production economics and farm management courses for the past two decades. Although the traditional examples of product-product optimization have come primarily from the agricultural production sector (e.g., legume-corn rotations and crop-livestock combinations), the concept is useful in analyzing the organization of any multi-product firm-including those firms which produce externalities in the form of environmental degradation.Three concepts or ideas usually are offered as giving rise to a positively sloped or complementary range on the product transformation surface-(l) one production process uses as an input a by-product of another production process, (2) one process uses quantities of a factor that are “surplus” to another, or (3) technical interaction (production function shifts) occurs.


2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne B. Ciulla

Abstract:This paper will discuss the uncertainty of job tenure, inequality of wages in American business, and the challenges for a creating a new social and moral compact between employer and employee. I begin by arguing that business ethics scholars missed some of the disturbing trends in management thinking because they often focused on current problems in business rather than questioning some of the basic assumptions about the way businesses are managed. As Rochefoucauld observed (albeit in a different context) we were overtaken by the evils of the present and I would argue, this was because we didn’t pay attention to the past. Business ethics research, like management research, is often ahistorical and hence tells only part of the story. If we don’t know how we got to a certain problem, it’s really difficult to see where the present problem and our solutions to it might lead us.


2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-365
Author(s):  
Peter Gratton ◽  

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have, I would admit, a most unlikely case study for use in a business ethics classroom. The story of Eichmann is already some sixty years old, and his activities in his career as a Nazi were far beyond the pale of even the most egregious cases found in the typical business ethics case books. No doubt, there is some truth to the fact that introducing Eichmann’s story into an applied ethics class would inevitably depict an unseemly analogy between the practices of latter day corporations and the bureaucracy of the Nazi era. My argument here, though, is that the story of Adolf Eichmann, as depicted in Hannah Arendt’s well-known Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers a philosophically cogent account of judgment and ethical decision-making that future business managers and employees would do well to heed. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally a series of press accounts for New Yorker magazine, deserves consideration alongside the Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and other classic ethics texts in a business ethics syllabus. This is not to say that Arendt’s work is uncontroversial; there are serious questions to be raised about both her depiction of Eichmann and her conclusions about “the banality of evil.” Nevertheless, her account of ethics, which, with its account of ethical duties and its case study of Eichmann’s character, shows both its Aristotelian and Kantian influences, is a warning to readers who would conflate morality with state laws and their duties with the needs of superiors. In short, I argue that, despite her well-known critique of modern large scale economies and her general avoidance of discussions of post-industrial corporations, Arendt may be a business ethicist of the first order.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Lívia Benita Kiss

Ethics has existed in religion and philosophy for thousands of years and has been applied to business activities in the same way ethical values and norms have been applied to everyday life. This article summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the study of business ethics as the form of applied ethics, which studies morals, ethical principles and problems in the business environment. The main goal of the study is to analyze business ethics from the point of view of integration of general morals and ethical norms to business, a combination of key signs of the right (good) or wrong behavior while doing business, determined on the basis of expected behavior approved by the society. The study of the role of business ethics in the corporate sector of the economy allowed to determine the most general principles of business ethics, namely awareness, caring, compliance, consideration, fairness, honesty, implementation, integrity, integration, loyalty, responsibility, and trustworthiness. The methodological basis of the research is analytical, statistical and comparative methods based on the use of Google Trends. In general, in Google Books, the use of the term business ethics shows an exponential trend. The findings show that the highest search frequency of business ethics is in the “all” category, after that in the “business and industry” category, then in the “science” category, finally in the “law and government” category. On average, the highest interest frequency was in 2004 in all examined categories. The author has proved that a third-degree polynomial downward trend can be fitted to each time series. The analysis of this concept on a geographical basis showed that the interest frequency of the principles of business ethics was most significant in South and Central East Africa, in South and Southeast Asia, over and above in the Caribbean. Keywords: business ethics, principles of business ethics, Google Trends, Google Books Ngram Viewer, time series analysis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 630-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Danyluk

The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of forces that compelled firms to turn their attention to the circulation of commodities in the second half of the 20th century. This article seeks to develop a more theoretically informed account of the logistics revolution by delineating the industry’s role in promoting the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalism. Drawing on Marxian geographical thought, I contend that the logistical turn of the past five decades has facilitated a multifaceted “spatial fix” to capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation—one that has reconfigured the geographies of circulation as well as production, consumption, and appropriation. This argument has important implications for our understanding of globalization. By enhancing the mobility of both commodity capital and the production process itself, advances in logistics have been an essential, albeit neglected, condition of global economic integration since the 1970s.


Author(s):  
Eileen Anastasia Reynolds

The author shares her directorial experience in the making of her short film where she invited her aunt to participate in the production process. As her aunt had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the past and was going through depression when the film was planned, it was supposed that perhaps the film-making process would help improve her mental health with her being part of a creative project. From script-writing, to acting, and even animating, the author had fully engaged her aunt from start to finish. The essay documents the author’s reflections of her aunt’s participation and how her sense of mental wellbeing improved dramatically as the film project progressed. The issue of exploitation is also considered in the essay as there is a difference between engagement and empowerment as opposed to deception and participation. Though the film did not win any awards at the 48-Hour Film Festival; the cinematic therapy experience highlighted the potential of seeking new pathways in supporting mental health patients.


Author(s):  
Jayrusha Ramasamy Gurayah ◽  
Jayrusha Ramasamy Gurayah

Small medium enterprises (SMEs) have proven and are known to be one of the biggest contributors to the economy of developing countries. Evidence shows that SMEs provide a number of job opportunities, which results in unemployment reduction, poverty eradication, and a bigger boost towards other economic activities. However, most SME entrepreneurs face an array of problems such as access to funding, building up international connections, getting appropriate knowledge and access to adequate technology. These issues are then further intensified by the lack of proper governance and the avoidance of business ethics by most SME entrepreneurs. Over the past years, the number of SMEs has grown drastically in developing countries (Nigeria, Algeria, Brazil, and Vietnam), which has also resulted in an increase in competition within the sector. This has given rise to the need to install the strategies of corporate governance with the aim of strengthening the competitiveness of SMEs.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-407
Author(s):  
Mark D. Schneider

PROFESSOR Miller, responding to Pamental, suggested that business ethics should be taught to (business) students by adopting or endorsing an ethical approach within which to discuss and evaluate business ethics issues. That is, when teaching business ethics, one ought to reveal to the students, one's own reasoned answers to the issues, and one's bias as between deontological and consequentialist approaches. Miller claims that otherwise, students get confused, having to choose between moral theories while having to decide on the morality of some specific business ethics issue.


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