Business Ethics

Business Ethics

Norma Swenson

University of Phoenix

Steve Jessup

August 14, 2010

Business Ethics

Introduction

To everyone in the working world, ethics is very important no matter what type of business they may work for. The ethics each person has are beliefs, values, and morals. These ethics come from each individual’s family, church, or other sources. Today, however, some people go against their ethical beliefs to get further ahead in business. By doing this, they are not being true to themselves or their families or churches. This paper will give the definition of business ethics and explain some ethical issues in today’s environment.

Definition of Business Ethics

Business ethics is applied to all aspects of business conduct. It is part of the conduct of each individual, as well as the business as a whole. According to BusinessManagement.com (2010), business ethics is a form of applied ethics that scrutinize ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that occur in a business environment. In keeping promises and being fair and honest with everyone, a business has to have good ethics to keep them happy and treat them with respect. Stockholders expect to be treated with every obligation they have been shown, because a business has their money. The employees, vendors, customers, and communities deserve to be treated with respect, as well. They deserve to have the word given by business executives to be kept and honored. Executives and managers have to remember their moral philosophy of any given situation does affect their ethical beliefs. A persons’ moral philosophy has to do with their Ethics, the people do it has to remember how they would want things to be for themselves.

Code of Ethics

Companies today develop and hands out a code of ethics to the whole organization. According to BusinessDictionary.com (2010), Code of ethics means “Written guidelines issued by an organization to its workers and management, to help them...