Ethics primer

Why ethics is important

Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Friedman

Usually when people think of business ethics what first comes to mind are subjects such as discrimination, insider trading, accounting fraud, sexual harassment, or environmental disasters. Certainly these things do have a lot to do with ethics but ethics is much more encompassing.

Ethics is not an easy territory to map out, but, generally, the ethical roadmap is delineated by a number of major signposts. These signposts mark off the ethical path that is:

• concerned with our interests and the interests of others
  
  
• often derived from religious doctrine or beliefs
  
  
• typically normative (what ought to be the case) and not simply descriptive (what is the case)
  
  
• applied universally to people in the same situation
  
  
• authoritative, i.e., it trumps many of our other interests
  
  
• conducive to human flourishment

There are many types of ethical theories and almost all of them lie somewhere within the roadway that these signposts outline.

If you do not have some sort of idea of the ethical terrain, some beginning point for your explorations, some idea of where you are heading, then, to paraphrase Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “...it doesn’t matter which way you go.” And since ethics is so important to all of us, it matters quite a lot which way we go.