What is Ethics?
Ethics is moral, intuitive thinking
Ethics: Values
Freedom
Truth
Fairness
Courage
Ethics: Norms
Honesty
Respect
Loyalty
Privacy
Ethics: Beliefs
Liberty
Spiritually
Values: Terminal Values
Terminal Values: Ends/purposes we should strive for
-> Personal Values (Peace of mind)
-> Social Values (World peace)
Values: Instrumental values
Instrumental Values: How one should live/behave
-> Moral Values (Being honest)
-> Competence Values (Behave imaginatively)
Moral Foundations (J. Haidt):
- Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
- Fairness/cheating: This foundation generates justice, rights and autonomy
- Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to anytime people feel that it is ‘one for all, and all for one’.
- Authority/subversion: It underlies virtues of leadership and deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
- Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in a more noble way.
- Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty.
Business norms:
- Triple bottom line
- Trust
- Business Ethics
Triple bottom line:
Environmental
Economic
Social
The ten principles: UN global compact
Human rights
Principle 1:
Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights.
Principle 2:
Also make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.
Labor
Principle 3:
Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.
Principle 4:
The elimination of all forms of compulsory and forced labor.
Principle 5:
The effective abolition of child labor.
Principle 6:
The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.
Environment
Principle 7:
Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges.
Principle 8:
Undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility.
Principle 9:
Encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.
Anti-corruption
Principle 10:
Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.
Integrity and trust: The principle agent theory
The principal agent theory
Principal is client and the agent is the service provider.
- Employer vs employee
- Stockholder vs manager
- Consumer vs company
- Society vs industry
Importance of trust:
- Incontrollable situations
- Agreements can’t seal all aspects
- Increase in gap between information and consumer society
- Decentralization in companies
- Growing specialization
- If trust is synonym to trustworthiness than it is linked to integrity (as an intrinsic moral value).
- Integrity as professional responsibility: new (moral hazardous) situations appeal to your own conscience. Independence and freedom go hand in hand with performance accountability.
- Professional responsibility lies at the root of modern ethical job performance.
Integrity
Moral management is not only about the role model.
- Integrity management is essential to promote integer, moral behavior. It requires backbone.
- The debate about integrity is a communal search for an applicable moral framework, comparable to a judicial decision making.
Integrity: Personal Dimention
- Integrity is closely bound up with business ethics and forms of social responsibility.
- Moral management will be willing to give account for their actions.
- Moral self-worth means moral pride.
(Non)-Alignment:
- Moral hazard is the difference of interests between the principal and the agent. It occurs after a deal has been made between two parties with asymmetric information and one party changes their behaviour as a result.
-> Example; when one party has more information than the other, they have an incentive to make advantage of that knowledge (insurance, people make use of it). OR an employee knows he has not been working all day, but the manager does not know. - Information asymmetry is where one party has more information about a good or service than the other.
-> Example; a doctor has more information about the medical condition of the patient than the patient
- Clear contracts
- Reliable reporting
- Strict external supervision
- Self-regulation
Trends and developments:
- Big tech regulations by the EU: consumers will get the choice to use the core services of big tech companies such as browsers, search engines, or messaging, and all that without losing control over their data.
- Humanization
- Embracing people
Two types of reasoning in business ethics:
Moral reasoning
- Can be along the lines of outcomes of your actions
- The motivations for your acting
Moral reasoning is mostly based on your emotions, not logic.
Streams in Ethics: Consequentialism
Consequentialism; locates morality in certain duties and rights. It judges whether something is right or not by what its consequences are.
Example; Most people would agree with the fact that lying is wrong. But if lying would safe a persons life, consequentialism says it is the right thing to do.
Streams in Ethics: Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism; ‘greatest good for greatest number’. Doing what is right means doing what achieves that for as many people as possible.
Streams in Ethics: Deontology (non-consequentialism)
Deontology (non-consequentialism); Follow the moral principals. Ethical theory that uses rules to distinguish what is right or wrong. (Despite its strengths, following deontology can produce results that many people find unacceptable.)
Example; you will not hack the code of a bomb that is about to be launched because you are not allowed to, however many people will die if you do not so.
Streams in Ethics: Egoism
Egoism: the highest good for each person, is his/her own happiness. Individual desire or interests.
Example; helping an old lady to cross the road, in order to receive happiness and acknowledgement that you are a nice helpful person.
Streams in Ethics: Kantianism (ethics of duties)
Kantianism / ethics of duties: Act in a way whereby you want anyone else in the world to act the same. If you do not want someone else to do it, it is not moral to do. Example: If you are in a situation where you want to lie, think by yourself, what would have happened if everyone in the world would lie, well, than no one could be trusted -> so, you should never lie.
Streams in Ethics: Ethics of rights and justice (Locke)
Ethics of rights and justice (Locke): All humans are entitled to the same rights.
Example; all people are born with the same moral status, no one is naturally born to be a ruler or a servant. We all have the same right to peruse self-preservation and happiness.
What is an ethical dilemma?
A situation in which a difficult choice must be made between two courses of action, either of which entails transgressing a moral principle.
Are situations where persons who are called ‘moral agents’ in ethics, are forced to choose between two or more conflicting options, neither of them resolves the situation in a morally acceptable manner.
