UNIT-1

Ethics,Morality,Concept,Importance & Relevance

 A very brief overview of all aspects of morality:

When many people see the word "morality," their first thought often
relates to sexual activity of some type. Many individuals and groups,
like us, use much broader definitions.

Morality can be defined as a system of criteria that determine whether

a specific act under defined conditions is right (moral), wrong
(immoral), or neutral (without moral implications).

There are many sources of ethics and morality in use:

 Moral codes are often derived by theologians who interpret holy

books, like the Torah in Judiasm, the Bible in Christianity and the
Qur'an in Islam. Their conclusions are often accepted as absolute
truth by believers. Unfortunately, each of these books contain
apparent contradictions and ambiguities that must be
harmonized. Since a person's interpretation of a holy book is
heavily influenced by the interpreter's culture, theologians within
a given religion -- and theologians among different religions --
often produce very different moral codes and theological beliefs.
The end result is -- for example in Christianity -- that the religion
consists of over 20,000 denominations, sects, traditions, etc.,
teaching very different beliefs and practices. This places the
validity of sets of moral codes derived by humans from the Bible
and similar texts, in serious doubt. 

 A current and very active debate involves the "science of

morality" -- the concept that superior and objective systems of
morality and ethics can be derived by studying human cultures
and by then applying the scientific method in order to maximize
people's well being. A leading proponent of this concept is Sam
Harris who advocates in his book "The Moral Landscape" "... a
conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the
context of science." 2
Needless to say, with such different sources from which moral systems
can be derived, we can expect to be deluged for the foreseeable
future with conflicting sets of moral codes concerning:

 equality for women;
 equality for sexual minorities like lesbians,
gays, bisexuals, transgender persons and transsexuals, and other
minorities;
 same-sex marriage, a.k.a. gay marriage;
 physician assisted suicide a.k.a. medical aid in dying (MAID);
 abortion access; and
 many dozens of other topics.
  
The branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.
Schools of ethics in Western philosophy can be divided, very
roughly, into three sorts. The first, drawing on the work of Aristotle,
holds that the virtues (such as justice, charity, and generosity) are
dispositions to act in ways that benefit both the person possessing
them and that person's society. The second, defended particularly
by Kant, makes the concept of duty central to morality: humans are
bound, from a knowledge of their duty as rational beings, to obey
the categorical imperative to respect other rational beings. Thirdly,
utilitarianism asserts that the guiding principle of conduct should
be the greatest happiness or benefit of the greatest number.

INTRODUCTION
Ethics in business context involves the behaviour in a business
transaction. Ethics is about the right and wrong. It is the principle that is
applicable in conducting the business. The acceptability of business
ethics can be determined by customer, government regulators,
competitors, interest group and many more.
In today’s environment, ethics is about the behaviour in humans which is
good or bad. Ethics deals with moral principles and values. With ethics, it
can avoid bad things and do the good things. It is also the rules of what
is right and what is wrong. There are many ethical issues arising in many
aspect of life such as in business, in workplace, in health care and also
in our daily life
It also known as corporate ethics which means the ethical practices and
policies that used in business. Corporate ethics will give a guidelines to a
company to measure what is the right and what is the wrong
. There are many ethical issues in business such as fundamental issues,
diversity issues, decision-making issues, compliance and governance
issues, and many more. For example, fundamental issues in business is
facing with integrity and trust. Integrity means the way we conduct the
business matters with honest and full commitment in treating the
customers.. It is very important in applying ethics in business because
the business can be succesfull when they get the trust from the
customers, vendors, suppliers, shareholders and many more. Business
ethics are essential as they keep business persons to operate in a moral
pedestal and laws that not only give their the internal satisfaction yet
increase sales because many people like to deal with an honest
business. So good business ethics should be practiced by all
businessman because it can lead success in business and people will
trust to business trade that provide by business indvidual, company or
organization.

Business ethics are important because they help to develop

customer and employee loyalty and engagement and contribute
overall to a company's viability. Businesses rely on reputation and a
lack of moral guidelines can ruin a reputation

Ethical behavior involves using an overall set of corporate values to

govern actions and decisions that come up in business. Using morality to
make corporate decisions is part of corporate culture and is seen as a
social responsibility.

There are tangible benefits to corporate ethics that are proven by case
studies.
 Improved customer loyalty
 Improved employee retention and easier recruitment of new
employees
 It makes it easier to attract investment capital
Along with loss of customers, employees and corporate reputation, in the
worst of cases, unethical corporate behavior and practices can result in
death, prosecution and imprisonment.

Why Do We Need a Code of Ethics?

A code of ethics is necessary because it allows individuals to know
what is expected of them as acceptable behavior. It provides
guidelines on making decisions that are in line with the goals of the
organization.

Regardless of the size of business, a code of ethics is a necessary tool

for any business looking to succeed. The values and morals
incorporated into a code of ethics should be well thought out to ensure
that the desired results are achieved. A successful code of ethics will
translate into a positive reputation for the organization, which increases
business for a company.

A code of ethics improves the business's reputation, and it holds the

employees and management accountable. It is important to provide
employees a guideline of what the company considers right and wrong.
Without a code of ethics, there can be misunderstandings as to what is
acceptable. If there are no standards in place, it can be very difficult to
hold employees responsible for behavior that negatively impacts
business. Every employee's decision can impact the business either
positively or negatively. By implementing a code of ethics that reflects a
company's views, many of the decisions that are made by employees
will positively affect the business.

Business Ethics is recognized as an important area for discussion by

both industry and academics in recent times. This is indeed a very
welcome trend. Till the last few decades, Business Ethics was
considered as a most conflicting term. The popular concept was that
if it is business it cannot be ethical, and if it is ethical, it cannot be a
business implying that business can make profits only through
immoral ways. But of later it has been realized that only ethical
companies which discharged their social responsibilities and welfare
of the society have survived competition and turbulent changes
through the years and have continued to flourish and prosper.
Therefore more and more interest and importance is being given by
the corporate houses to the application of the ethical values in
business. The term business ethics should be understood from all
angles. It is argued that it is unethical to resort profiteering on one
hand and it is unethical to incur losses. For the simple, reason that a
company which cannot make profits and incurs losses is a liability on
the system by wasting scarce resources creating the problem of
unemployment etc. Thus instead of profits being contradictory to
ethics, business ethics dictates that the first responsibility of the
business is to remain profitable and generate revenue for all the
stakeholders, shareholders, employees, government, customers,
public etc., of the society. Business ethics is a form of applied ethics.
It aims at inculcating a sense of value orientation within company's
employee as to how to conduct business responsibly. Because the
term ‘ethics’ can pose problems in the international context, i.e., the
term does not translate well into action and it is difficult to find a
common understanding. Some organizations choose to recast the
concept of business ethics through other terms like integrity, social
responsibility, customer welfare, employee welfare, social value
added, transparency and disclosure in accounting and environmental
protection.

Ethics: Descriptive, Normative, and Analytic

by Austin Cline

Updated April 26, 2018

The field of ethics is usually broken down into three different

ways of thinking about ethics: descriptive, normative and
analytic. It isn't unusual for disagreements in debates over
ethics to arise because people are approaching the topic from a
different one of these three categories. Thus, learning what they
are and how to recognize them might save you some grief later.

Descriptive Ethics-The category of descriptive ethics is

the easiest to understand - it simply
involves describing how people behave and/or what
sorts of moral standards they claim to follow.
Descriptive ethics incorporates research from the fields of
anthropology, psychology, sociology and history as part of the
process of understanding what people do or have believed
about moral norms.

Normative Ethics

The category of normative ethics involves creating or evaluating

moral standards. Thus, it is an attempt to figure out what
people should do or whether their current moral behavior is
reasonable. Traditionally, most of the field of moral philosophy
has involved normative ethics - there are few philosophers out
there who haven't tried their hand at explaining what they think
people should do and why.

The category of analytic ethics, also often referred to as

metaethics, is perhaps the most difficult of the three to
understand. In fact, some philosophers disagree as to whether
or not it should be considered an independent pursuit, arguing
that it should instead be included under Normative Ethics.

Nevertheless, it is discussed independently often enough that it

deserves its own discussion here.  

Here are a couple of examples which should help make the

difference between descriptive, normative and analytic ethics
even clearer.

1. Descriptive: Different societies have different moral

standards.

2. Normative: This action is wrong in this society, but it is

right in another.

3. Analytic: Morality is relative.

All of these statements are about ethical relativism, the idea

that moral standards different from person to person or from
society to society. In descriptive ethics, it is simply observed
that different societies have different standards - this is a true
and factual statement which offers no judgments or
conclusions.

In normative ethics, a conclusion is drawn from the observation

made above, namely that some action is wrong in one society
and is right in another. This is a normative claim because it
goes beyond simply observing that this action is treatedas
wrong in one place and treated as right in another.

In analytic ethics, an even broader conclusion is drawn from

the above, namely that the very nature of morality is that it is
relative. This position argues that there are no moral standards
independent of our social groups, and hence whatever a social
group decides is right is right and whatever it decides is
wrong is wrong - there is nothing "above" the group to which
we can appeal in order to challenge those standards.

1. Descriptive: People tend to make decisions which bring

pleasure or avoid pain.

2. Normative: The moral decision is that which enhances

wellbeing and limits suffering.
3. Analytic: Morality is simply a system for helping humans stay
happy and alive.

All of these statements refer to the moral philosophy commonly

known as utilitarianism. The first, from descriptive ethics,
simply makes the observation that when it comes to making
moral choices, people have a tendency to go with whatever
option makes them feel better or, at the very least, they avoid
whichever option causes them problems or pain. This
observation may or may not be true, but it does not attempt to
derive any conclusions as to how people should behave.

The second statement, from normative ethics, does attempt to

derive a normative conclusion - namely, that the most moral
choices are those which tend to enhance our well-being, or at
the very least limit our pain and suffering.

This represents an attempt to create a moral standard, and as

such, must be treated differently from the observation made
previously.

The third statement, from analytic ethics, draws yet a further

conclusion based upon the previous two and is the very nature
of morality itself. Instead of arguing, as in the previous
example, that morals are all relative, this one makes a claim
about the purpose of morals - namely, that moral exist simply
to keep us happy and alive.

Justice and Fairness

Arguments about justice or fairness have a long tradition in Western

civilization. In fact, no idea in Western civilization has been more
consistently linked to ethics and morality than the idea of justice. From
the Republic, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, to A
Theory of Justice, written by the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls,
every major work on ethics has held that justice is part of the central
core of morality.
Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves or, in more
traditional terms, giving each person his or her due. Justice and fairness
are closely related terms that are often today used interchangeably.
There have, however, also been more distinct understandings of the two
terms. While justice usually has been used with reference to a standard
of rightness, fairness often has been used with regard to an ability to
judge without reference to one's feelings or interests; fairness has also
been used to refer to the ability to make judgments that are not overly
general but that are concrete and specific to a particular case. In any
case, a notion of desert is crucial to both justice and fairness. The
Nortons and Ellisons of this world, for example, are asking for what they
think they deserve when they are demanding that they be treated with
justice and fairness. When people differ over what they believe should
be given, or when decisions have to be made about how benefits and
burdens should be distributed among a group of people, questions of
justice or fairness inevitably arise. In fact, most ethicists today hold the
view that there would be no point of talking about justice or fairness if it
were not for the conflicts of interest that are created when goods and
services are scarce and people differ over who should get what. When
such conflicts arise in our society, we need principles of justice that we
can all accept as reasonable and fair standards for determining what
people deserve.
But saying that justice is giving each person what he or she deserves
does not take us very far. How do we determine what people deserve?
What criteria and what principles should we use to determine what is
due to this or that person?
Principles of Justice

The most fundamental principle of justice—one that has been widely

accepted since it was first defined by Aristotle more than two thousand
years ago—is the principle that "equals should be treated equally and
unequals unequally." In its contemporary form, this principle is
sometimes expressed as follows: "Individuals should be treated the
same, unless they differ in ways that are relevant to the situation in
which they are involved." For example, if Jack and Jill both do the same
work, and there are no relevant differences between them or the work
they are doing, then in justice they should be paid the same wages. And
if Jack is paid more than Jill simply because he is a man, or because he
is white, then we have an injustice—a form of discrimination—because
race and sex are not relevant to normal work situations.
There are, however, many differences that we deem as justifiable criteria
for treating people differently. For example, we think it is fair and just
when a parent gives his own children more attention and care in his
private affairs than he gives the children of others; we think it is fair when
the person who is first in a line at a theater is given first choice of theater
tickets; we think it is just when the government gives benefits to the
needy that it does not provide to more affluent citizens; we think it is just
when some who have done wrong are given punishments that are not
meted out to others who have done nothing wrong; and we think it is fair
when those who exert more efforts or who make a greater contribution to
a project receive more benefits from the project than others. These
criteria—need, desert, contribution, and effort—we acknowledge as
justifying differential treatment, then, are numerous.
On the other hand, there are also criteria that we believe are not
justifiable grounds for giving people different treatment. In the world of
work, for example, we generally hold that it is unjust to give individuals
special treatment on the basis of age, sex, race, or their religious
preferences. If the judge's nephew receives a suspended sentence for
armed robbery when another offender unrelated to the judge goes to jail
for the same crime, or the brother of the Director of Public Works gets
the million dollar contract to install sprinklers on the municipal golf
course despite lower bids from other contractors, we say that it's unfair.
We also believe it isn't fair when a person is punished for something
over which he or she had no control, or isn't compensated for a harm he
or she suffered. And the people involved in the "brown lung hearings" felt
that it wasn't fair that some diseases were provided with disability
compensation, while other similar diseases weren't.
Different Kinds of Justice

There are different kinds of justice. Distributive justice refers to the

extent to which society's institutions ensure that benefits and burdens
are distributed among society's members in ways that are fair and just.
When the institutions of a society distribute benefits or burdens in unjust
ways, there is a strong presumption that those institutions should be
changed. For example, the American institution of slavery in the pre-civil
war South was condemned as unjust because it was a glaring case of
treating people differently on the basis of race.
A second important kind of justice is retributive or corrective justice.
Retributive justice refers to the extent to which punishments are fair and
just. In general, punishments are held to be just to the extent that they
take into account relevant criteria such as the seriousness of the crime
and the intent of the criminal, and discount irrelevant criteria such as
race. It would be barbarously unjust, for example, to chop off a person's
hand for stealing a dime, or to impose the death penalty on a person
who by accident and without negligence injured another party. Studies
have frequently shown that when blacks murder whites, they are much
more likely to receive death sentences than when whites murder whites
or blacks murder blacks. These studies suggest that injustice still exists
in the criminal justice system in the United States.
Yet a third important kind of justice is compensatory justice.
Compensatory justice refers to the extent to which people are fairly
compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them; just
compensation is proportional to the loss inflicted on a person. This is
precisely the kind of justice that was at stake in the brown lung hearings.
Those who testified at the hearings claimed that the owners of the cotton
mills where workers had been injured should compensate the workers
whose health had been ruined by conditions at the mills.
The foundations of justice can be traced to the notions of social stability,
interdependence, and equal dignity. As the ethicist John Rawls has
pointed out, the stability of a society—or any group, for that matter—
depends upon the extent to which the members of that society feel that
they are being treated justly. When some of society's members come to
feel that they are subject to unequal treatment, the foundations have
been laid for social unrest, disturbances, and strife. The members of a
community, Rawls holds, depend on each other, and they will retain their
social unity only to the extent that their institutions are just. Moreover, as
the philosopher Immanuel Kant and others have pointed out, human
beings are all equal in this respect: they all have the same dignity, and in
virtue of this dignity they deserve to be treated as equals. Whenever
individuals are treated unequally on the basis of characteristics that are
arbitrary and irrelevant, their fundamental human dignity is violated.
Justice, then, is a central part of ethics and should be given due
consideration in our moral lives. In evaluating any moral decision, we
must ask whether our actions treat all persons equally. If not, we must
determine whether the difference in treatment is justified: are the criteria
we are using relevant to the situation at hand? But justice is not the only
principle to consider in making ethical decisions. Sometimes principles of
justice may need to be overridden in favor of other kinds of moral claims
such as rights or society's welfare. Nevertheless, justice is an expression
of our mutual recognition of each other's basic dignity, and an
acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent
community we must treat each other as equals.

Justice vs Fairness 
 

Justice and fairness are concepts or notions that are hard to define
without taking the help of the other. Justice and fairness are talked about
in the same breath, and we have come to accept that what is just is also
fair and that to be seen as fair, we must be just. However, as will be
clear after reading this article is that all justice is not fair, and all that is
fair is not just. Let us take a closer look at the statement.

Justice.Justice is the moral fabric that binds modern societies and

civilizations. It is a concept based upon morals and ethics and what is
morally correct is seen as just. We talk about social justice that is a
concept of equality and strives for equal rights for all sections of the
society. In this sense, justice means providing every person in the
society what he or she deserves. Justice for all is a slogan that has
become fashionable in all societies, and it is a standard that is sought to
be achieved by all societies. It is a fact that life is not always just for all,
but the concept of justice seeks equality for all.

Justice is often seen as a quality of being just or fair. In the field of law,
justice is seen as meting out punishment to the culprit who has done a
crime or harmed another individual. In broader terms, justice is giving a
person his due.

FairnessWe are fair when we are not biased and show no favoritism. In
a classroom, it is the endeavor of a teacher not to appear as being
biased towards a few children and to treat all children equally and with
fairness. Among siblings, it is common to see kids foul cry every now
and then to show their displeasure when they see the other sibling get
something that they think they should be getting. Fairness is a quality of
being fair, showing no bias towards some people or individuals.

What is the difference between Justice and Fairness?

• Fairness is a quality of being fair, showing no bias towards some

people or individuals. Justice, in broader terms, is giving a person his
due.

• We want fair treatment in all situations as we believe that we are all

equals and deserve impartiality.

• Equality is an integral component of justice and all governments work

on the principle of distributive justice or equality for all.

• Life is not fair as it does not give equal opportunities to all but justice
demands that government treat all its citizens as equals and provide
equal opportunities for all.

• Someone who is fair is seen as just, but sometimes justice can be cruel
and seem not fair.

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