KOLEJ PERNIAGAAN

BPMN 3123
ETIKA PENGURUSAN
Moral Issues in Business
11th Edition
by
William H. Shaw and Vincent Barry
Part I: Moral Philosophy and Business

Chapter 1
The Nature of Morality
 CHAPTER 1
The Nature of Morality

 Chapter One examines the following topics :

Business and organizational ethics

Moral versus nonmoral standards, etiquette and
professional codes
Religion and business morality
Ethical relativism and the “game” of business
Moral principles, conscience, and self-interest
Personal values, integrity, and responsibility
Moral Reasoning, arguments, and judgments
 Ethics (moral philosophy) SN

• A broad field of inquiry that addresses a fundamental query that all of us, at least
think about – How should I live my life?
• What sort of person should I strive to be?
• What values are important?
• What standards or principle should I live by?
• Exploring these issues immerses one in the study of right and wrong
• Moral philosopher want to understand
• the nature of morality
• the meaning of its basic concepts
• the characteristics of good moral reasoning
• how moral judgments can be justified
• the principles or properties that distinguish right actions from wrong actions
• Ethics deals with individual character and with the moral rules that govern and
limit our conduct
• Ethics investigates questions of right and wrong, duty and obligation, and moral
responsibility that guide our actions
Ethics vs. Moral SN
• What some people mean by saying that something is a matter of ethics is often
what other people mean by saying that is a matter of morals
• Most people see no real distinction between a person’s “morals” and a person’s
“ethics”
• Almost everyone uses
• “ethical” and “moral” to describe people we consider good & actions we
consider right
• “unethical” and “immoral” to designate bad people & wrong actions
 Business Ethics SN
• The study of what constitutes right and wrong, or good and bad, human conduct in
a business context (Shaw & Barry, 2010)
• Berkaitan dengan gelagat baik dan buruk atau betul dan salah yang berlaku dalam

• konteks perniagaannorma-norma
Kajian bagaimana (Buchholtz, 2000)
moral peribadi diaplikasikan kepada aktiviti-aktiviti

& matlamat- matlamat syarikat komersial (Laura Nash)

Business
• Any organization whose objective is to provide goods or services for profit

Businesspeople
• Those who participate in planning, organizing, or directing the work of business

Organizational Ethics
• concern with moral issues that arise anywhere that employers and employees
come together

Definisi Moraliti

Standard yang dipunyai oleh setiap individu @ sesuatu kumpulan mengenai apa
yang betul dan salah @ baik dan buruk (Velasquez, 2006)
 MORAL VERSUS NONMORAL STANDARDS SN

Standard Moral
• norma-norma mengenai tindakan yang dipercayai sebagai betul & salah secara
moral & nilai-nilai yang diletakan ke atas objek moral yang dipercayai sebagai
baik @ buruk secara moral

Characteristics of Moral Standards

1. Concern behavior that seriously affects human well-being

• Moral norms against lying, stealing and killing – deal with actions that can
hurt people

2. Moral standards take priority over nonmoral standards

• Take moral standards to be more important than other considerations in
guiding our actions

3. The soundness of moral standards depends on the adequacy of the reason that
support them
• Moral standards are not made by authoritative bodies – validity of the moral
standards not depends on authoritative fiat
• Validity of the moral standards depends on the quality of the arguments or
the reasoning that supports them
 SN
Morality & Etiquette

Morality
• Morality must be distinguished
• from etiquette (rules for well-mannered behavior)
• from law (statutes, regulations, common law, and constitutional law)
• from professional codes of ethics (the special rules governing the members of
a profession).
 SN
Morality & Etiquette

Etiquette

• The norms of correct conduct in polite society or any special code of social
behavior or courtesy
• it is considered bad etiquette to chew with your mouth open & it is considered
good etiquette to say “please” and “thank you” when receiving something
• Judging people’s manners as “good” or “bad” & the conduct as “right” or “wrong” –
judgments about manner, not about ethics
• Rules of etiquette – are prescriptions for socially acceptable behavior
• follow the rules – good manners, polite etc. & violate the rules – considered as
ill-mannered, impolite or even uncivilized, but not necessarily immoral
• Rules of etiquette – are generally nonmoral in character
• say “congratulations” to the groom & “best wishes” to the bride
• Violations of etiquette – can have moral implications
• male boss who refers to female subordinates as “honey” shows bad manners
 Morality & Law SN

Law

1. Statutes
• Laws enacted by legislative bodies. Example of statute – law that defines & prohibits theft
• Laws enacted by local governing bodies – ordinances

2. Regulations
• Administrative regulations – detailed regulations covering certain kinds of conduct issuing

by boards or agencies
• Regulations that do not exceed the board’s statutory powers & do not conflict with other
laws – are legally binding
3. Common Law
• The body of judge-made law, first developed in the English-speaking world based on few
statutes
• Courts wrote opinions explaining the bases of their decisions in specific cases, including
the legal principles those decision rested on
• Each of these opinions became the precedent for the later decisions in similar cases
• Common law is valid if it harmonizes with statutory law

4. Constitutional Law
• Court rulings on the requirements of the Constitution and the constitutionality of
legislation
• Constitution empowers the courts to decide whether laws are compatible with the
Constitution
 Law versus Moral SN

1. An action can be illegal but morally right

Example – Helping a Jewish family to hide from the Nazis was against German law in
1939 – but it would have been a morally admirable thing to have done
• In a democratic society with a basically just legal order –something is illegal provides a
moral consideration against doing it
Example – One moral reason for not burning trash in the backyard – it violates an
ordinance that the community has voted in favor of
• The illegality of an action can make it morally wrong, even if the action would have been
morally acceptable
• Nonconformity to law is not always immoral
• There can be circumstances where violating the law is morally permissible, perhaps even
morally required

2. An action that is legal can be morally wrong

• An action might be legal but would be morally wrong
• Law codifies a society’s customs, ideals, norms and moral values
• Changes in law – reflect changes in what a society takes to be right and wrong
• Changes in the law can alter people’s ideas about the rightness or the wrongness of
conduct
• If a society’s laws are sensible and morally sound, it is a mistake to see them as sufficient
to establish the moral standards that should guide us
• The law cannot cover all possible human conduct
 Professional Codes SN

Professional codes of ethics

• Rules that govern the conduct of members of a given profession

• Members of a profession have agreed to abide by those rules as a condition of
their engaging in that profession
• Violation of a professional code may result in the disapproval of one’s
professional peers & loss of one’s license to practice that profession

Unwritten Codes
• Part of the common understanding of members of a particular profession
Example – Professors should not date their students

Written Codes
• Codes that may be written down by an authoritative body – they may be better
taught and more efficiently enforced
• Sometimes so vague and general as to be of little value & they amount to little
more than self-promotion by the professional organization
• industries or corporations publish statements of their ethical standards
 SN
• Professional codes can be very specific and detailed
• It is difficult to generalize about the content of professional code of ethics –
because they involve a mix of purely moral rules, of professional etiquette & of
restrictions intended to benefit the group’s economic interest

• Professional codes of ethics are neither a complete nor a completely reliable

guide to one’s moral obligations
• Not all the rules in professional code are purely moral in character
• A professional should take seriously the code that governs his/her profession,
but he/she still have a responsibility to assess its rules for himself/herself
 SN
Where Do Moral Standards Come From

Source of moral standards

Moral codes of a society

• Moral standards shared by its members

• Many things influence what moral principles we accept

• Our early upbringing
• The behavior of those around us
• The explicit and implicit standards of our culture
• Our own experiences
• Our critical reflections on those experiences
 RELIGION AND MORALITY SN

• Religion provides its believers with moral instructions, values and commitments
• Religion involves not only a formal system of worship but also prescriptions for
social relationships
• “Golden Rule” – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
• represents one of humankind’s highest moral ideals

Morality Needn’t Rest on Religion

The Sources of Morality

 The justification of moral norms:

 Moral philosophers study mainly the justification rather than the origin, of
moral norms

 The claim that morality is based on religion:

 Religion provides incentives to be moral
 Religion provides moral guidance
 Moral norms are in essence divine commands
 Morality Needn’t Rest on Religion SN

• People believe that morality must be based on religion

• Without religion – people would have no incentive to be moral
• Only religion can provide moral guidance
• Morality is based on the commands of God
• None of these claims is convincing

None of these claims is convincing

1. A desire to avoid hell and to go heaven may prompt some of us to act morally
–
– this not the reason or even the most common reason that people behave
morally
• People act morally out of habit or simply because that is the kind of person they
are
• People are motivated to do what is morally right out of concern for others or just
because it is right
 SN

2. The moral instructions of the world’s great religions are general and imprecise –
they do not relieve us of the necessity to engage in moral reasoning ourselves

Bible
• Thou shall not kill
• Christians disagreed among themselves over the morality
• of fighting in wars
• of capital punishment
• of killing in self-defense
• of slaughtering animals
• of abortion and euthanasia
 SN

3. Some theologians have advocated the divine command theory – if something is

wrong – reason – it is wrong is that God commands us not to do it
• Many theologians & most philosophers would reject this view
• They would contend that if God commands human beings not to do
something
• it is because God sees that it is wrong
• it is not God’s forbidding it that makes it wrong
• the fact that it is wrong is independent of God’s decrees
• Most believers think not only that God gives us moral instructions or rules but
also that God has moral reasons for giving them to us
• All believers believe that God commands us to do what is right and forbids us to
do what is wrong
• Morality is not necessarily based on religion
• We draw our moral beliefs from many sources – for philosophers the issue is
whether those beliefs can be justified
 ETHICAL RELATIVISM SN

Ethical Relativism
 moral norms derive their ultimate justification from the customs of the society in
which they occur
 moral norms are not universal – but are dependent upon a particular cultural or
social context
• Morality is merely a function of what a particular society happens to believe
Theory
• Ethical relativism is the theory that right and wrong are determined by what one’s
society says is right and wrong
• What is right in one place may be wrong in another
• the only criterion for distinguishing right from wrong – is the moral system of
the society in which the act occurs
Example – Abortion
• Is condemned in Catholic Ireland BUT is practice as a morally neutral form of birth
control in Japan
 The Sources of Morality SN

 Implications of relativism:

1. It undermines any moral criticism of the practices of other societies as long as their
actions conform to their own standards
 There is no independent standard by which to judge the rightness or
wrongness of other societies
2. There is no such thing as ethical progress
 The idea of ethical progress loses its significance
3. It makes no sense for people to criticize principles or practices accepted by their
own society
 It makes no sense to criticize the moral code of one’s own society or culture
Relativism and the Game of Business SN

Albert Carr
 Business has its own norms and rules that differ from those of the society
 A number of things that we normally think of as wrong are really permissible in
a business context

Example
• Conscious misstatement & concealment of pertinent facts in negotiation
• Lying about one’s age on a resume
 What Carr defending – is a kind of ethical – business has its own standards &
business actions should be evaluated by those standards
 SN

 Carr’s analogy is itself weak

• Business activity can affect others
• Business is indeed an activity involving distinctive rule and customary ways of
doing things – it is not really a game

 By divorcing business from morality – Carr misrepresents both

• He incorrectly treats standards and rules of business activity as if they had
nothing to do with the standards and rules of ordinary morality
• He treats morality as something that we give lip service to but no influence on
our lives
 HAVING MORAL PRINCIPLES SN

• Most people pause to reflect on their own moral principles and on the practical
implications of those principles
• what principles people should have or which moral standards ca be justified

• When a person accepts a moral principle & when that principle is part of his\her
personal moral code – then the person believes the principle is important and well
justified

Richard Brandt
• When a principle is part of a person’s moral code – that person is strongly
motivated toward the conduct required by the principle & against behavior that
conflict with that principle
• The person will tend to feel guilty when his or her own conducts violates that
principle and to disprove of others whose behavior conflicts with it

Other Philosophers

• Accepting a moral principle is not purely intellectual act like accepting a scientific
hypothesis or a mathematical theorem