Ethical and Moral Issues in Business

Ethical and Moral Issues in Business

People are faced with both ethical and moral issues each day. It does not matter if the issue is in their private lives or if the issue is business related, ethics and morals play an important role when people or companies are involved. Businesses establish codes of conduct or policies to "serve remedy those aspects or structures that need change, and it should protect those that are moral," (DeGeorge, 2010, p. 20). Ethics and morals go hand-in-hand and are essential to success of the business.

Some people think that ethics and morals have the same meaning but they do not. The subject of this paper will focus on the differences between ethical and moral issues, the differences between personal ethics and business ethics, and examples of common ethical problems in business. To determine the differences between ethical and moral, both words must first be defined.

Ethics and Morals

"Ethics is a systematic attempt to make sense of our individual and social moral experience, in such a way as to determine the rules that ought to govern human conduct, the values worth pursuing, and the character traits deserving development in life," (DeGeorge, 2010, p. 13). In business, ethics is a code of conduct or a number of established policies that regulate how workers should behave on-the-job; an accepted set of rules to dictate behavior in a work related environment. Ethics is the behavior and every business has its own set of rules, policies, and code of conduct. For example, most companies agree that all employees should be respectful of one another. When the rules are not adhered to, the employee displays unethical behavior.

"Morality consists of rules of human behavior and specifies that certain actions are wrong or immoral and that others are right and moral" (DeGeorge, 2010, p. 6). Morals help define appropriate behavior in a person are the values a person learns as he or she is raised. An example of moral behavior would be when a person is faced with making a decision that goes against that person's moral beliefs. It may be against a person's morals to steal from the workplace, but it may also be against a person's morals to report a coworker for stealing.

Ethical and Moral Issues

The difference between ethics and moral issues in business is that ethics are the behavior and moral is what a person believes in. Ethical issues are defined as, "situations concerning right and wrong where values are in conflict," (Trevino & Nelson, 2007, p. 3). An example of an ethical issue is discrimination. For example if a man and woman both applied for the same promotion, and she was more qualified for the promotion, but the man is hired because the human resource officer is more biased toward women. Discrimination occurs