Fundamental

of business
ethics

Dr. Moe Moe Khaing

Content
❖ What is ethics?
❖ Ethical criteria
❖ Ethics and business
❖ Ethics and law
Why ethics is important …
Ethics is our living…
Being Ethical Person …
important manners to practice in daily life ….
What is ethics?
❖ Moral principles that –
❖ govern a person’s behavior or
❖ conducting of an activity.
❖ Ethics is practice.
❖ Develop your character.
Ethics require practice …
How can be ethical …
❖ Know what is right and wrong.
❖ Do what is right.
❖ Avoid what is wrong.
❖ Obey the rules.
Act something good …
Good consequences
Should do

Good and bad consequences

Good>Bad - should do
Bad>Good – should not do
An action

Bad consequences
Should not do
Doing Duties …
If you want to live with others ???

Keeping promises

Making up for wrong doing

Gratitude: returning a favor

Avoiding injuring others

Justice

Improving conditions of others

Self-improvement
W.D. Ross
Being Ethical Person …
build ethical character ….

❖ Trustworthiness ❖ Understanding
❖ Respect ❖ Generosity
❖ Responsibility ❖ Cooperative
❖ Fairness ❖ Not bullying
❖ Caring ❖ Polite
❖ Citizenship ❖ Take care property
Respect the rights
- Entitlements

- To have rights is to be entitled to act on our own or to be treated by

others in certain ways without asking permission of anyone or being
dependent on other people’s goodwill

- To make claims on other people either to refrain from interfering in

what we do or to contribute actively to our well-being – not as
beggars, who can only entreat others to be generous, but as
creditors, who can demand what is owed to them
Types of rights
❖ Legal right
❖ Those rights that are
recognized and enforced as
part of a legal system.
❖ e.g. minimum wage
payment
❖ Moral right
❖ They derive their force not
from being part of a legal
system but from more
general ethical rules and
principles
❖ e.g. keeping promise
Types of right
❖ Specific right
❖ Some rights are specific in
that they involve
identifiable individuals
❖ E.g. loan contract
❖ General right
❖ They involve claims against
everyone
❖ E.g. human right
Types of right
❖ Negative right
❖ They are correlated with
obligations on the part of
others to refrain from
acting in certain ways that
interfere with our own
freedom of action
❖ E.g. property right
❖ Positive right
❖ They impose obligations on
other people to provide us
with some good or service
and thereby to act
positively on our behalf
❖ E.g. welfare, education,
medical care
Be justice
❖ They are concerned with:
❖ the comparative treatment given to the members of a group
when benefits and burdens are distributed,
❖ when rules and laws are administered,
❖ when members of a group cooperate or compete with each
other, and
❖ when people are punished for the wrongs they have done or
compensated for the wrongs they have suffered.
Business
ethics
Rule of the game and ethics…
Rule of the game and ethics…
Business and its rule of the game!
- Business has economic character/ economic interaction
- Business carries out exchange – for something you take,
you have to give something
- Business is profit-oriented
- Business is impersonal
- Business has competition
- Business transactions are assigned monetary values
Ethics and profit

The role of organizational ethics in performance:

Source: Ferrell, Fraedrich, and ferrell, 2011.
Reasons to run a business ethically!
- Protect brand and company reputation
- Maintain customers’ trust and loyalty
- Maintain investors’ confidence
- Avoiding corporate scandals
- Market place competition
- Earn public acceptance and recognition
- Pressures of globalization
- The right thing to do
 Ethics and Excellence

“…. Business as an essential part of the good

life, living well, getting along with others,
having a sense of self-respect, and being
part of something one can be proud of.”

Robert C. Solomon
 Ethics and Excellence

“…. such notions as “honest advertising” and “truth in

lending” are not simply legal impositions upon
business life nor are they saintly ideals that are
unrealistic for people in business. They are rather the
preconditions of business and, as such, the essential
virtues for any business dealing”
Robert C. Solomon
Ethics and
law
Ethics and law
The law embodies the ethics of business.

- In countries with well-developed legal system

- The countries with under developed legal system
- The relative lack of international law leaves ethics as an important
guide for global business efficiency
- Ethics is needed not only to address the situations not covered by
the law but also to guide the creation of new law.
 Ethics and law
Ethics Law
• Private (individual) • Public (everyone)
• Rules are developed within the culture • Rules are designed
• Self-enforcement • Third party enforcement
• Nice to be ethical • Has to be legal
• General rules • Precise and detained rules
The law is not enough
• The law is inappropriate for regulating certain aspects of business
activity.
• The law is often slow to develop in new areas of concern.
• The law itself often employs moral concepts.
• The law itself is often unsettled, so that whether some course of
action is legal must be decided by the courts.
• The law is inefficient instrument