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BUSINESS ETHICS

EAST WEST UNIVERSITY

DHAKALecture# 05

Ethical Issues in Business

14 June 2013

Dr. Pallab Kumar Biswas

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How Do We Avoid Ethical Dilemmas

Very often, we look at the harmful and wrong conduct ofcorporate executives and wonder:

Where were their minds and what were they thinking

whey they decided to engage in such bad behaviour?

In many cases, people use different strategies to avoidfacing ethical issues.

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Common Language of Rationalization

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Everybody Else Does It

People often feel comfortable and think that they do nothave to face an ethical issue when they simply assure

themselves, Everybody else does it.

People use faulty reasoning to conclude that it must be

right because so many people are doing it. One tool to overcome the easy slip into this

rationalization is to define the set of everybody.

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Business people often use this rationalization as theyface tough competition. They seize this rationalization

because they can ignore the ethical issue in the name

of business survival.

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Just as everybody does it is not ethical analysis, thenotion, thats the way it has always been done may

not be based on an ethical analysis.

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Many people rely only on law as their ethical standard,but that reliance means that they have resolved only

the legal issue, not the ethical one.

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We often think that our ethical missteps are just smallones that do not really affect any one else.

We are not thinking through the consequences of our

actions when we rationalize rather than analyse ethical

issues in this manner. For example, it is probably true that one fraudulent

insurance claim is not going to bankrupt an insurance

company. However, what would happen if everyone

who believes his or her fraud is singular and isolatedsubmitted a false insurance claim?

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We all dont share the same ethics

This rationalization is used frequently in companieswith international operations.

The rationalization is a failure to acknowledge that

there are some common values that demand universal

application and consideration.

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Call it by a different name

Download from internet:

Copyright infringement

Cooking the books Smoothing earnings,

Financial engineering,

Aggressive Accounting

In the first case, there is an ethical issue because

copying copyrighted music without permission is taking

something that does not belong to you or taking unfair

advantage.

In the second case, there is an ethical issue in the

category of telling the truth or not leaving a false

impression.

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