Chapter 5: Ethics in International Business

1. Ethics ( đạo đức) : accepted principles

-person
-a profession
- organisation

*Business ethic: accepted principle to o business people ( trong môi trường business)

*Business ethic issue:

- Employment practice ( giảm lương, tăng giờ làm)  liên quan đến employee
- Human rights (an toàn lao động)  liên quan đến employee và customer
- Environment: Tragedy of the common --. Public goods
- Corruption ( tham nhũng)

2. Why Do Managers Behave Unethically

- Profit  unrealistic goal
- organization Culture
- Structure / style
- Decision-makin process
 bias
 Identify selection
 Quality assurance

a. Personal ethic  govern wrongly about accepted principle

b. Decision-making processes  Bias, Identify selection, Quality assuarance
c. Organizational culture 
d. Unrealistic performance expectations  reach KPI
e.

3. The Philosophical Approaches To Ethics:

3.1 Four common straw men approaches
a. Friedman doctrine - the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits, so long as
the company stays within the rules of law (làm đúng luật là được, miễn tăng profit)
b. Cultural relativism - ethics are culturally determined and firms should adopt the ethics of
the cultures in which they operate  làm theo văn hóa của quốc gia đó
“when in Rome, do as the Romans do” - nhập gia tùy tục
c. Righteous moralist - a multinational’s home country standards of ethics should be followed
in foreign countries
d. Naïve immoralist - if a manager of a multinational sees that firms from other nations are not
following ethical norms in a host nation, that manager should not either (quan điểm ngây
thơ – người trước làm được, mình làm lại cũng không sao)

All approaches offer inappropriate guidelines for ethical decision making

3.2 Other approaches:

- Utilitarian ethics (đạo đức thực dụng / vị lợi) - the moral worth of actions or practices is
determined by their consequences  vụ lợi cho mục đích chung của đông người
o The best decisions, produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
o where the benefits clearly outweigh the costs
- Kantian ethics - (Immanuel Kant) - people should be treated as ends and never purely as
means to the ends of others  ai cũng được đối xử như nhau
o People have dignity (nhân phẩm) and need to be respected as such
- Rights theories - human beings have fundamental rights and privileges which transcend
national boundaries and cultures
o establish a minimum level of morally acceptable behavior
o the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies the basic principles that should
always be adhered to irrespective of the culture in which one is doing business
- Justice theories: focus on the attainment of a just distribution of economic goods and
services
o all economic goods and services should be distributed equally except when an
unequal distribution would work to everyone’s advantage
o veil of ignorance - everyone is imagined to be ignorant of all his or her particular
characteristics: race, sex, intelligence, nationality, family background