BUSINESS ETHICS

Business Ethics

Business Ethics

Task 1 - Reflective review on personal ethical point of view

Usually, the ethics that are to be applied is understood to be ethical theory—most often some variety of consequentialism or deontology. In this theory, it is hoped, will yield some kind of easily digested principle which, once we have fed the relevant empirical facts into it, will allow us to derive guidance for correct behavior in the particular circumstances confronted by business organizations. According to some normative theorists, there are good reasons for doubting that this is the best way for business ethicists to proceed. Some of these reasons are mainly rhetorical. Ethical theories are controversial, and seem to be subject to intractable reasonable disagreement, one would seem to gain little in the way of persuasive force, then, by arguing for a controversial conclusion in business ethics (e.g., the permissibility of insider trading) on the basis of moral premises that are equally or perhaps more controversial (e.g., the truth of classical hedonic act-utilitarianism). Other reasons, however, are to be found more in considerations internal to ethical theory itself. Some of the ways in which ethical theory has developed in recent years that support an approach to business ethics that differ sharply from the conception of applied ethics described above. Doubts regarding the conception of ethics implicit in the caricature of applied ethics above are not new.

Many philosophers have questioned the idea that ethical theory properly involves the search for a master principle applicable to any and all species of moral problems. Bernard Williams, most notably, devoted much of his philosophical career to arguing against moral theorists' attempt to reduce the complexity of our moral thought to a single principle. As a descriptive matter, Williams noted, our moral beliefs are the product of a long and complex ethical tradition, with many different religious or other social strands, there is thus no reason to expect, according to Williams, that the apparent complexity of our beliefs is merely a surface-level phenomenon and that there must be an underlying unity to them that could be captured by a single principle.

There is no reason to expect such a unity regarding our moral beliefs, so is there no reason to expect it regarding moral reality. Why is there an expectation that [ethical truth] should be simple? In particular, why should it be conceptually simple, using only one or two ethical concepts rather than many?' One finds in Williams and in other critics of master principle theories of morality two main arguments. One—an argument from complexity—is gestured at in the quotations, in the preceding paragraph, prior to thinking about morality in any kind of theoretical or systematic way we hold a variety of moral values and convictions that do not seem reducible to any single principle or consideration. If, as it seems it must, the starting place of moral theorizing is to be our considered moral judgments, then it seems unlikely that we will end up embracing any single overarching master ...