Ethical standards in business - Essay Example

1987). Thus any virtuous manager aught to be particularly conscious about the validity and credibility of one's ethical affiliations and must ensure that the organization being managed and run by him/her abides by the time tested and authentic standards of integrity and propriety. It often gets difficult for the managers operating in the contemporary organizations to accurately identify the ethical standards, considering the deluge of ethical philosophies circulating in the academic and intellectual spheres.

In the given context, it will be highly relevant to consider the opinions pertaining to ethics furnished by various schools of philosophy, which will go a long way in understanding the dilemma faced by the conscientious managers pertaining to the identification of appropriate ethical standards in a given situation. As per the theory of ethical relativism, there exist no universal norms pertaining to what is right or wrong (Ethical Relativism 2008). This gives every individual a free hand in deciding what is right or wrong as per one's discretion and understanding. . As per the theory of ethical relativism, there exist no universal norms pertaining to what is right or wrong (Ethical Relativism 2008).

This gives every individual a free hand in deciding what is right or wrong as per one's discretion and understanding. Ethical relativism holds that the meaning of 'right' and 'wrong' mostly depends on a society's dominant moral perceptions and thus the ethical standards can never be universal and may vary from place to place and from time to time. The confusion pertaining to ethics and in particular the business ethics gets further aggravated when one takes into consideration the consequentialist theories that tend to identify if an action is ethical or unethical on the basis of its final consequences.

Utilitarianism is one such consequentialist theory that holds that any action is to be labelled as being truly ethical only if it succeeds in doing the "greatest good to the greatest number of people" (Ethics Matters 2006). As per this theory, an action aught to be considered to be ethical if the net happiness produced by it exceeds the unhappiness associated with it. Thus if any organization decides to build a dam to assuage the water shortages being faced by a state, utilitarianism will consider it to be ethical, even if it involves uprooting and displacing some historical monument situated in the vicinity of such a project.

In contrast, the nonconsequentialist theories of ethics like Kantianism and the social contract theory totally negate the individual or group preferences in the overall process of judging the credibility of ethical or unethical actions and give predominance to the fundamental rules and principles cherished by the