1.3 Business Ethics

Ethics is the discipline that examines one's moral standards or the moral standards of a society. Ethics is the study of moral standards - the process of examining the moral standards of a person or society to determine whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable in order to apply them to concrete situations and issues. The ultimate aim of ethics is to develop a body of moral standards that we feel are reasonable to hold - standards that we have thought about carefully and have decided are justified standards for us to accept and apply to the choices that fill our lives.

3.1 The Nature of Business Ethics
Business ethics concentrates on the moral standards as they apply to business policies, institutions, and behavior. Business ethics, in other words, is a form of applied ethics. It includes not only the analysis of moral norms and moral values, but also attempts to apply the conclusions of this analysis to that assortment of institutions, technologies, transactions, activities, and pursuits that we call business.

Because corporate acts originate in the choices and actions of human individuals, it is these individuals who must be seen as the primary bearers of moral duties and moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it makes perfectly good sense to say that a corporate organization has moral duties and that it is morally responsible for its acts.

Business ethics investigates three different kinds of issues: systemic, corporate, and individual.

1.3 Business Ethics

Because corporate acts originate in the choices and actions of human individuals, it is these individuals who must be seen as the primary bearers of moral duties and moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it makes perfectly good sense to say that a corporate organization has moral duties and that it is morally responsible for its acts.

1.3 Business Ethics

The fact that multinationals operate in more than one country produces ethical dilemmas for their managers that managers of firms limited to a single country do not face.

	The ability to shift its operations between countries enables the multinational to escape the social controls
	that a single nation might attempt to impose on the multinational and can allow the multinational
	to play one country against another.

It can sometimes transfer raw materials, goods and capital among its plants in different countries at terms that enable it to escape taxes and fiscal obligations that companies limited to a single nation must bear.
They often have the opportunity to transfer a new technology or set of products from a more developed country into nations that are less developed. It is often faced with the quandary of deciding which of these different norms and standards to implement in its many operations.

3.2 Moral Responsibility & Blame
Moral reasoning, however, is sometimes directed at a related but different kind of judgment: determining whether a person is morally responsible, or culpable, for having done something wrong or for having wrongfully injured someone. The term moral responsibility is sometimes used as an equivalent to moral duty or moral obligation.

1.3 Business Ethics

A person is morally responsible only for those acts and their foreseen injurious effects (a) which the person knowingly and freely performed or brought about and which it was morally wrong for the person to perform or bring about, or (b) which the person knowingly and freely failed to perform or prevent and which it was morally wrong for the person to fail to perform or prevent.

Two conditions completely eliminate a person's moral responsibility for causing a wrongful injury: (1) ignorance and (2) inability. There are also several mitigating factors that can lessen a person's moral responsibility depending on the severity of the wrong. Mitigating factors include:

a)	Circumstances that leave a person uncertain but not altogether unsure about what he or she is doing (these
	affect the person's knowledge);
b)	Circumstances that make it difficult but not impossible for the person to avoid doing it (these affect the
	person's freedom);
c)	Circumstances that minimize but not completely remove a person's involvement in an act (these affect
	the degree to which the person actually caused or helped to cause the wrongful injury). These can lessen
	a person's responsibility for wrongdoing depending on a fourth factor: the seriousness of the wrong.

Who is morally responsible for jointly produced acts? The traditional view is that those who knowingly and freely did what was necessary to produce the corporate act are each morally responsible.