โ Scribed by Richard McCarty
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The comparative seriousness of business law and business ethics gives some business people the impression that there is nothing important in business ethics. The costly penalties of illegal conduct compared to the uncertain consequences of unethical conduct support a common illusion that business ethics is much less important than law for business people. To dispel the illusion I distinguish two perspectives from which we can view the relation of business and normative systems: the internal and external perspectives. I show that in one perspective, ethics is hardly less important than law, and in the other perspective it is more important, more fundamental than law. I conclude with a discussion of why business persons must place ethical and legal rules ahead of profits.
Why take business ethics seriously? Most people in business know why laws must be taken seriously: Laws are important social rules with serious penalties. Ethics, on the other hand, seems like law's annoying little sister. Ethical rules carry no serious penalties, unless legislators think they're important enough to write them into law. It seems to many business people, then, that ethical rules must be taken seriously only when they are also laws. Consequently, it appears that so long as there are laws to regulate business activities, business people need not take ethical rules very seriously. This line of reasoning concludes that business ethics is something for legislators to study to determine, by their special expertise, which ethical principles are serious enough to enforce with legal penalties and which are not. People in business, then, not being experts in ethics, need not bother with business ethics. Let the law be
East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. since 1986. He has published articles primarily in aesthetics and ethics.
our guide, some people in business argue, and don't burden business with "soft," "fuzzy" ethical precepts.
Arguments such as this are common in the business world. They suggest that the law is sufficient to regulate business activities and that ethics, being much less important than law, need not be taken very seriously by people in business. I hope to show here, however, how this type of reasoning falls apart when we consider it carefully, demanding precision in our thinking, sincerity in our beliefs and integrity in our conduct. My strategy in displaying the fallacies in this line of thought will be to divide and conquer: That is, I will show how it blurs an important distinction between two perspectives in business ethics. When we clearly separate those perspectives, however, it will become evident that business ethics is hardly less important than business law, and that business people must often take ethics even more seriously than law. To characterize these perspectives clearly, it will be helpful to begin with some definitions.
Ethics and law are normative systems, they are systems of rules for conduct. They are not the only normative systems, though they are very important ones. Etiquette is another system of rules for conduct; so is fashion. The rules of fashion tell us not to wear contrasting plaids, and not to wear blue jeans to job interviews. Normative systems can be very simple, consisting of only a few rules (the Ten Commandments, for example), or they can be very complex, such as federal tax laws.
"Business" can refer to the complete set of present businesses, big and small, and "also to actual business institutions, such as contemporary markets. In this discussion, though, it is important to see what business is essentially, quite apart from actual firms doing business in actual markets at the present time.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
The differences in business reactions to legal regulation, and the nature of business moralities, are examined through the eyes of an 'expert' group -in-house lawyers. The research indicates that lawyers inevitably provide a degree of control through their technical expertise, but that they also ide