Legal compliance alone no longer serves the long-term interests of many companies, who find that sustainable profitability requires thinking about people and the planet as well as profits. However, business organizations ignore the ethical and social expectations of consumers, employees, the media, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), government officials, and socially responsible investors at their peril.
While the phrase “business ethics” is not oxymoronic (i.e., a contradiction in terms), there is plenty of evidence that businesspeople and firms seek to look out primarily for themselves. F ew subjects are more contentious or important as the role of business in society, particularly, whether corporations have social responsibilities that are distinct from maximizing shareholder value. Second, studying ethics may help businesses be ethical, which may be crucial for long-term success. Similarly, studying ethics–its history, components, famous figures, and famous dilemmas–can help you appreciate where your own sense of ethics comes from and help you appreciate ethical problems generally. Yet, studying art–its history, components, movements, influences, famous works, and famous figures–can help you appreciate the art you already enjoy and look critically at art generally. Many people have different taste in art, much like many people have a different ethical framework that guides their actions. After all, don’t we each have a sense of personal ethics which has guided us throughout our lives? If we each have a kind of ethical “sixth-sense”, why make this a subject of study?įirst, studying ethics may help you appreciate ethical problems and ways to reach solutions which can help train that “sixth sense.” For example, ethics may be a bit like art. Studying ethics may seem like a superfluous activity. Ethics is a worthwhile subject of study for at least three reasons: (1) studying ethics can help you appreciate ethical problems, (2) behaving ethically may help the long-term success of a business, and (3) behaving ethically is often correlated with behaving legally.
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