Andrea Cecilia Gómez Lavalle

BUSINESS ETHICS

BY TOM SORREL & JOHN HENDRY

BROAD BUSINESS ETHICS

Business, State and Society

Social responsibility lays on the shoulders of both, the state and businesses alike, but the question that surges from this statement is: where does the social responsibility of the state end and that of an individual business begin? The action of businesses giving back to society can be a good thing for example when they donate equipment for hospitals or schools, despite the fact that those should probably come from taxes and the state; but it can also be a source of trouble when schools and hospitals dedicate more and more of their time and resources chasing private funds than actually teaching their kids or treating their patients in need.

 Green Business

In broad business there’s always the issue of a business’s responsibility to society and the environment from which said society sustains itself from. This can be done in a great number of ways. Some of the businesses for example, clean their own pollution or reduce their emissions, however sometimes they don’t do it out of a sense of responsibility to the environment but to avoid legal action, fines or publicity that would give them any kind of bad reputation.

Businesses also create and prompt initiatives, ventures and campaigns to promote “Green Business” such as “Eco-Tourism” and recycling among green community service projects that promote sustainability for future generations within society. Some of them also make significant investments for landscape improvements and rehabilitation of countryside sites. To create and support these initiatives is morally good and it’s an obligation from the business and environmental ethics point of view even if the ones that revolve around energy-saving and pollution control fall a little short on the morally required whereas the ones that center around sustainability are more in tune with the demands of environmental ethics.

International Business Ethics

When dealing with these type of ethics businesses usually deal with different cultures with different points of view, and sometimes a different sense of morality, we are talking about diversity, which is why it’s very important to decide how far is the business going to conform with the standards of the culture within they’re operating and how far to insist in their home country standards. Bribery can also be an issue when working with the standards of different countries where this action is acceptable and a common practice.

Each culture has its own set of values according to historical perspective, context and the nature of the culture itself. This however does not mean that each one of these sets is equally good. Having a different set of values in different cultures though it seems inevitable also leaves little room for objectivity in morality and ethics.

This situation leads to conflict and ethical dilemma when one country believes its standards are morally better than those of another country, or that one practice is unacceptable in one society while it is a normal occurrence in another.

It may also happen that there while there may not be any moral conflict between the two societies, there might be dramatic differences in their interpretations of what is ethically acceptable in practice and what is not. This is bound to happen between developed and less developed countries but it may come from a variety of factors.

Values

The third part of Business Ethics: Broad Business Ethics, revolves around the responsibility that every business has to society and the environment and the differences and conflicts that may appear in the moral and ethical side when dealing with a multicultural and international situation, and how every culture has its own set of values according to their history.