BSB111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Meta-Ethics, Business Ethics, Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences
Week 1 Business Law and Ethics Lecture Notes
Topic 1: The nature of ethics
What is Ethics?
• Every human being thinks about how to live a good life and how to make the right
sorts of decisions. We think about what makes our actions right or wrong, and what
makes a person good or bad.
• When we investigate these issues and try to understand them, we are studying
ethics (also known as moral philosophy).
• There are three types of questions we ask when we investigate ethics:
o Meta-ethical questions
o Descriptive questions
o Normative questions
Approaches to investigating ethics
• Meta-ethical questions (about ethical concepts)
o Are there moral facts?
o Is ethics relative to individuals and cultures?
• Descriptive questions (what actually occurs)
o What factors encourage unethical behaviour in business?
o Which companies are more likely to have a code of ethics?
• Normative questions (how we ought to act, or what sort of people we should be)
o Should businesses pay accountants to reduce their tax?
o Should employees always report unethical behaviour in the workplace?
1. is business ethics?
• Business ethics is simply the study of ethics in business.
o Questions of right and wrong, or good and bad, in relation to the world of
business
• Our focus in this unit is on normative questions relating to ethical issues in business,
and different ways we could arrive at answers to these questions
• However, we will also touch on a few meta-ethical and descriptive issues.
• Note that the terms ethics and morality both refer to examining issues related to
right/wrong, good/bad, so for our purposes they are used interchangeably
Business Ethics at 3 different levels
• Ethical issues in business can be examined at three different levels:
o The individual level: How individuals make ethical choices, the characteristics
of an ethical individual
▪ (Weeks 2 & 3)
o The organisational level: How ethics is affected by the business context, how
businesses can address ethical issues
▪ (Week 1, but also covered in BSB110)
o The systemic level: How economic systems can be structured in an ethical
way, how the various goods in society ought to be distributed
▪ (Week 4)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
2. Ethics and other standards
• Although we have defined ethics in terms of right/wrong, good/bad, there are some
other standards that can also refer to right or wrong, good or bad:
o Standards from etiquette and custom
o Legal and regulatory standards
o Religious standards
• Breaching these standards could also be considered wrong or bad. We need to
understand these, as in some circumstances there is some overlap with ethical
standards, but in other cases there is not
Etiquette and custom
• These are standards regarding how people are expected to behave in business
settings, such as how they ought to dress and how they ought to communicate.
• If someone does not comply with these standards (e.g. you wear jeans to a formal
meeting with a client), we may say that they have acted in the wrong way.
• However, these standards refer to what is socially acceptable, not necessarily what is
ethical.
• Complying with these standards does not necessarily mean that someone is moral,
and breaching these standards does not necessarily mean that someone is immoral.
Legal and regulatory standards
• There is a wide range of laws and other regulations that apply to businesses – we
will examine some of these from week 5.
• Laws and ethics often overlap, as laws may be passed in order to address an issue of
moral concern (such as shops taking advantage of customers, see week 10)
• This close relationship has been described as The law floats on a sea of ethics
(US Chief Justice Earl Warren)
• However, there are some occasions where a particular law may be considered
unethical, or where an ethical action may be illegal.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Week 1 business law and ethics lecture notes. What is ethics: every human being thinks about how to live a good life and how to make the right sorts of decisions. We need to understand these, as in some circumstances there is some overlap with ethical standards, but in other cases there is not. Etiquette and custom: these are standards regarding how people are expected to behave in business settings, such as how they ought to dress and how they ought to communicate. However, like legal standards, these may not cover all ethical obligations: so, we need to find another way to justify our ethical choices. These groups have different standards of etiquette, different laws and different religions. At the moment, the entire marketing team is male. If ethical relativism is true, we could not criticise others(cid:1685) practices. We would not be able to morally condemn the use of slave labour, or employee discrimination based on ethnicity: 2.
