Question

• What are values/ethics?

• What are they for?

• What is the ethical obligation of an organization?

• Is it important to define organizational values?

• Describe a Defining Moment for you, when your personal values did not align well with the organization's. What happened?

Answer 1

"In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so."

1. Value/Ethics denotes the degree of importance of some thing or action, with the aim of determining what actions are best to do or what way is best to live or to describe the significance of different actions.

In other words, Ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society as a whole.

Types Of Ethics :

• Major Ethical Systems

• Utilitarianism

• Deontology

• Virtue ethics

• Ethics of care

• Egoism

• Religion or divine command theory

• Natural Law

• Social contract theory

• Rawls’s theory of justice

• Moral relativism

2. Ethics are for the following dilemmas :

• How to live a good life.
• Our rights and responsibilities.
• The language of right and wrong.
• Moral decision - what is good or bad?

Good people as well as good actions - Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life.

Searching for the source of right and wrong -

At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways :

• By discovering what God wanted people to do.
• By thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems.

If a person did this properly they would be led to the right conclusion.

3. Ethical Obligations of an Organisation - Ethical obligations are a set of “ought to” standards that define a moral course of action and draw a line between right and wrong. Although ethical obligations in business share similarities with legal rules and regulations in determining how a business conducts itself while striving to make a profit and achieve strategic company goals, ethical obligations are really more about discretionary decisions and value-guided behaviour.

Ethical obligations exist in almost every facet of a business environment. Policy and decision-making in areas such as sales, pricing and advertising all involve ethical obligations, as do dealings with staff members, contractors and suppliers. Each has benefits for carrying out an ethical obligation as well as consequences that can cause ethical dilemmas.

4. Is it important to define organisational value?

Yes, It is important since the business is related to various aspects of dealings such as hiring staffs, maintaining a safe & healthy environment, using business resources wisely & avoiding situations that have the potential to create a conflicts of interests, such as accepting gifts from suppliers or making a hiring decision not because the applicant has the best qualification, but because the applicant is a relative of the business owner.

Business owners are ultimately responsible for whether a business full fills its ethical obligations, following are the its objectives to lead by an example:

• Work with staff members to create ethics standards and a code of ethical conduct.
• It encourages & open communications to discussion regarding the ethical dilemmas and how to solve them among the ethics team.
• Conduct ethics training that sets clear expectations and shows staff members how their decisions and attitude towards ethical behavior impacts long-term business.

5. Describe a Defining Moment for you, when your personal values did not align well with the organization's. What happened?

Back in high school I worked for a local grocery store. Someone had dumped over 2 dozen of broken computer monitors in the parking lot. They would cost hundreds of dollars to legally dump, so my store manager asked me to wait until darkness and move the computer monitors to the local scrap shop, so that the store manager would get some pay out of those dumps & he promised me to pay handsome amount for the involvement. I refused, and called the local trash services, notifying them of the illegal dumping on our property. They agreed to pick it up for free. later i was fired for being honest.

Hence, at the heart of ethics is a concern about something or someone other than ourselves and our own desires and self-interest.

So when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves.