Emerging Business Ethics Issues:

The first step in understanding business ethics is to create ethical issues awareness. Gender, race, culture,
characteristics of a job can create ethical issues within a business. What is an ethical issue? An ethical issue is a
situation or problem that requires thought from an individual or organization, maybe even an opportunity that
needs thought, or an investigation to make a decision on whether the issue is right or wrong. Some of the more
common ethical issues and dilemmas in business are as followed: Abusive or intimidating behavior, lying,
conflicts of interest, corporate intelligence, discrimination, sexual harassment, environmental issues, fraud,
insider trading, intellectual-property rights, and privacy issues.
Lying: There are two types of lying: commission and omission. Commission lying is creating a perception or
belief by words that intentionally deceive the receiver of the message. Omission lying is intentionally not
informing the channel member of any difference, problems, safety warnings, or negative issues relating to the
product, service. Some business people believe that lying occasionally is a must in order to succeed. You have
to ask yourself whether those lies distort the values that are associated with ethical behavior.
Conflicts of interest: It is pretty self-explanatory. It exists when a person must choose between his/her gain, the
organizations, or of some other group. Also, keep private and business matters separate.
Corporate intelligence: It is the collection and analysis of information on markets, technologies, customers,
and competitors. Corporate intelligence is the discovery of important information to stay competitive. Some
ways to get valuable information is hacking, dumpster diving (stuff that is discarded on a public street is
considered fair game), social engineering, bribery, and hiring away key employees.
Discrimination: Discrimination of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, public assistance
status, disability, age or national origin, is considered discrimination and is illegal.
Sexual harassment: It is any repeated, unwanted behavior of a sexual nature perpetrated upon one individual
by another. The acts may be verbal, written, visual, or physical and in order for it to be sexual harassment it has
to be unwanted.
Environmental Issues: These are now becoming the significant business concerns. Global warming, water
pollution and waste management are the main issues today. Recycling plastics especially will be the problem
for the twenty first century.
Fraud: Fraud in general, is any purposeful communication that deceives, manipulates, or conceals facts in order
to create a false impression. There are many types of fraud including: accounting fraud, marketing fraud,
implied falsity, labeling issues, consumer fraud.
Consumer fraud is where the consumer tries to deceive businesses for their own gain such as shoplifting.
Intellectual- Property Rights: It deals with the protection of intellectual properties such as music, books, and
movies. Copyrighting is one way of trying to protect the creators' product.
Objections to Business Ethics:
We have described business ethics as the process of rationally evaluating our moral standards and applying
them to business situations. However, many people raise objections to the very idea of applying moral standards
to business activities. In this section, we address some of these objections and also look at what can be said in
favor of bringing ethics into business.
Occasionally people object to the view that ethical standards should be applied to the behavior of people in
business organizations. Persons involved in business, they claim, should single-mindedly pursue the financial
interests of their firm and not sidetrack their energies or their firm’s resources into “doing good works.” Three
different kinds of arguments are advanced in support of this view.
First, some have argued that in perfectly competitive free markets, the pursuit of profit will by itself ensure that
the members of society are served in the most socially beneficial ways. To be profitable, each firm has to
produce only what the members of society want and has to do this by the most efficient means available.
Arguments of this sort conceal a number of assumptions:
 the argument assumes that any steps taken to increase profits will necessarily be socially beneficial.
 the argument assumes that, by producing whatever the buying public wants (or values), firms are
producing what all the members of society want.
 the argument is essentially making a normative judgment (“managers should devote themselves to the
single-minded pursuit of profits”) on the basis of some unspoken and unproved moral standard (“people
should do whatever will benefit those who participate in markets”).
A second kind of argument sometimes advanced to show that business managers should single-mindedly pursue
the interests of their firms and should ignore ethical considerations. Unethical managers have often used this
argument to justify unethical conduct.
For example: Nazi officers used after World War II to defend their murder of about 16 million Jews and others
that Hitler’s government labeled “undesirables.” When they were captured and brought to trial, the Nazi officers
repeatedly defended their actions by claiming: “I had to do it because I had a duty to serve my government by
following its orders.
It takes only a little reflection to realize that the loyal agent’s argument rests on questionable assumptions.
 the argument tries to show (again) that ethics does not matter by assuming an unproved moral standard
(“the manager should serve the employer in whatever way the employer wants to be served”).
 the loyal agent’s argument assumes that there are no limits to the manager’s duties to serve the
employer.
 the loyal agent’s argument assumes that if a manager agrees to serve an employer, then this agreement
somehow justifies whatever the manager does on behalf of his employer.
A third kind of objection is sometimes made against bringing ethics into business. This is the objection that to
be ethical it is enough for businesspeople to follow the law: If it is legal, then it is ethical.
For Example: pre-Civil War slavery laws, required us to treat slaves like property, and the laws of Nazi
Germany required Anti-Semitic behavior.
Ethicists agree that all citizens have a moral obligation to obey the law so long as the law does not require
clearly unjust behavior. This means that, in most cases, it is immoral to break the law. Tragically, the obligation
to obey the law can create terrible conflicts when the law requires something that the businessperson knows or
believes is immoral. In such cases, a person will be faced with a conflict between the obligation to obey the law
and the obligation to obey his or her conscience. Such conflicts are not unusual. In fact you, the reader, likely
will have to deal with such a conflict at some point in your business life.