The concept of ethical and moral behavior in our society is of
paramount importance to the survival and continuation of our society. Today we
are surrounded by endless cases of unethical behavior by individuals and
corporations around the world. The lack of morality and ethics has had a
deleterious effect on the world.
In recent years, our country has had an endless series of scandals
by corporations in the United States being involved in frauds, scams, and
scandals. The list of corrupt corporations seems endless of which some ended in
bankruptcy. (http://current.com/items/89684450_10-worst-corporations-of-the-year-unethical-and-harmful-activities.htm)
recently listed the 10 worst corporations of the year, AIG, Chevron, Philip
Morris, Dole, Cargill, Chinese National Petroleum Corporations, and Roche. The
common threads that tie them together are there harmful and unethical behavior
that has influenced the livelihood of millions of people. In 2009 the list
included AIG, Target, HP, Best Buy, Apple, Bank of America, United Health Care,
Verizon, Sprint, etc. The list of corporations seems endless that having
violated the consumers trust and confidence. These corporations are guilty of
not supporting the needs of their employee’s medical benefits needs, poor
customer services, cutting the employee benefits, 401K plan holdings, price
fixing, and pollutions into the environment. It is a disaster in modern society
how so many hundreds of corporation are only interested in profit and will go
to any lengths to increase those profits regardless of which it will effect or
what negative impact corporate greed will impact the environment. Today even
one person who has no or low morals can affect millions of people’s lives.
Bernard Madoff is such a man who admitted to the largest Ponzi scheme in
history. He was a former stock broker, and investment advisor. He pleaded
guilty to eleven federal crimes of defrauding thousands of investors of
billions of dollars. The losses were over $18 billion dollars. Thousands of
people lost their entire retirement funds and live savings as result of his
actions according to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff). Even though
he was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison, it would not return the money
lost due to the greed and arrogance of such a man. The impact of what he did has
made us examine what the moral versus immoral standards are of today’s
corporate businessman. According to (Business Ethics, pg 9) five
characteristics of moral standards are, involved with serious injuries or
benefits, not established by law or legislature, should be preferred to other
value including self-interest, based on impartial considerations, and
associated with special emotions and vocabulary. Man for thousands of years has
had to deal with personal and business ethics. Business ethics deal with the
specialized study of what is morally right and wrong. Business organizations
utilize the resources of land, labor, capital, and technology to create usable
goods. They form various consumer
products and contribute to employee salaries, investor’s return, and government
taxes. Mining, manufacturing, retailing, banking, marketing, transporting,
insuring, constructing, and advertising are all different aspects of the
productive and distributive processes in today’s’ modern business
institutions.” (Business Ethics, pg 13).
Appropriate business ethics are when people are treated fairly, honestly,
and with respect for those businesses or individuals who deal with a local and
international business. There are aspects of moral responsibility that
incorporate the fair dealing with various professional and honest dealings with
a company’s structure such as: manufacturing, marketing, service, or
administrative operations of a company, even in different parts of the world.
Ethical relativism is truths that apply to people of all societies
throughout the world. Many countries may condone slavery, racial, and sexual
discrimination, genocide, patricide, and torture of animals. But, The United
Nations and other world organizations have deemed these practices as unethical
and immoral to perpetrate on mankind. There is today child slavery and the
trafficking of children which is prevalent in many countries, with 158 million
children 5 to 14 in child labor worldwide according to UNICEF. Somalia, for
example, in 2002 signed the Convention of the Rights of the Child, or CRD.
Factories in many countries violate international law to use child in their
factories and make these children conduct hazardous work. Countries such as
Fiji according to BBC, monitors Asia Pacific. Africa still has child slavery in
many areas, forcing children to spend all day in cacao fields, chopping down
plants along the Ivory Coast in Africa to make chocolate, according to
Intelligencer Journal. These children are involved also with the unethical
practice of mining for conflict diamonds in South Africa which is unethical in
immoral war in the region. Slave labor is used by corporations to mine for
diamonds which are sold to the United States, which are used to buy weapons and
explosives for various third world war activities. We are almost fifty years
ahead of most countries in workers’ rights. We treated our workers and
employees a hundred years ago the same way workers are being treated in many
countries such as: in Pakistan, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in China, in India, in
Philippines, and in South Africa. These countries are morally unethical by
American standards in regards to their human right violations. But, they do not
think they are doing anything wrong when they have their workers exist in a
dirty and unhealthy work environment. They give their workers slave level pay,
no medical or dental, no days off. It is interesting how with most people in
the world aware of slavery during Moses time with the Pharaoh of Egypt paying
the Jews next to nothing in wages and with their constantly being beaten. Today,
many corporations and manufacturing facilities in other countries have not
learned from those biblical lessons. It appears that when religious teaching is
removed from the schools and philosophy removed from schools and universities,
the amount of corruption, stealing, cheating, stealing, and falsifying
corporate records increases.
Society is devoid of ethical relativism because the morally right
thing to do in any given situation has not been taught by these generations of
parents to children. Relativism privileges the current moral standards in a
society, but people do not learn the lessons from other people’s lack of sound
judgment and moral upbringing.
Moral development is something that starts in childhood with the
forming of relationships with other people. We are taught to treat our piers
with dignity, respect and honesty. As we get older, we hopefully develop a
moral compass or a moral reasoning. We learn the difference between right and
wrong. The federal government has conducted surveys and found that the average twelve
year old does not know the difference between right and wrong or good and evil.
We have had Dr. Spock, a psychologist, influence a generation of
children with his approach to disciplining children. According to his book
“Baby and Child Care”, published in 1946, he proposed the children’s needs and
family dynamics. His views on permissiveness and children’s need of instant
gratifications have had an influence on the accountability of the actions of
children’s morally in society. Many
people believed that ethics and morality were neglected by Dr. Spock. Many
parents felt that this let to children lying, cheating, stealing, or doing what
it took to attain their sense of instant gratification. Time outs in the corner
and other ridiculous child behavior techniques further confused children into
understanding the need of basic respect, and moral self-discipline in our
society. Lawrence Kohlberg was a psychologist who helped develop moral
education and reasoning, he is best known for his theory of stages of moral
development. (Business Ethics, pg25-26) Kohlberg’s six stages were as follows:
Level 1
(Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and
punishment orientation
(How can I avoid
punishment?)
2. Self-interest
orientation
(What's in it
for me?)
Level 2
(Conventional)
3. Interpersonal
accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good
boy/good girl attitude)
4. Authority and
social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order
morality)
Level 3
(Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract
orientation
6. Universal
ethical principles
(Principled
conscience)
It
is unfortunate that none of these stages were taught to me or any children in
elementary school or college. I believe that due to the fact during the 1970’s
to current times, parents were so involved in trying to make ends meet they
never spent time with their children to help instruct them in moral
development. That is what churches and synagogues were supposed to be for. As a
result there have been millions of children who became “latch key” children.”
Children let at home unattended when both parents were at work. Many of these
children lacked proper parental guidance in life and ended up in street gangs
and became criminals with no moral or ethical compass to guide them in life.
Morality is defined as that and individual or group has about what
is right and wrong or good and evil as illustrated in (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality)
and (BE) (Business Ethics) pg 8). People who were children in the 1970’s are
today the leaders. They are CEO’s and directors of national and international
corporations. They were taught how to run a company, but many were without
moral reasoning or had an understanding of ethical values. Many corporate CEO’s
who are ethical have a history of profitable operations. Ethical conduct by
senior management creates happy workers, good stock returns, and profitable
growth of an ethically sound corporation. Social responsibility and behavior
has a great deal to do with how corporations survive during hard economic
times. During economic hardships, many corporations become unethical by cutting
employees benefits and pay to deal with hard times. Many companies cut corners
on safety or environmentally ethics when dealing with manufacturing processes.
There are thousands of manufacturing corporations around the world
that have dumped their waste into American rivers, and oceans around the world.
They become environmentally unethical by improperly recycling the waste
products of high technology products. Companies that product electronics often
dump chemical and copper or toxic waste into dumpsters and landfills without
properly handling of such items. These toxic chemicals leech into the ground
water of the area, in many cases, causing birth defects in the children of the
contaminated areas. In third world countries, Dow Chemical, have been accuses
of periodically introducing pesticides into the environment without adequate
testing before hand. Many pharmaceutical companies today are under
investigation by the FDA due to the thousands of people that get have develop
complications and death after taking newly released prescription drugs. The
corporate managers and CEOs think that by taking shortcuts in the development
of their drugs they are saving money, but not lives. There is a growing
movement to make the corporate leaders who are responsible for such actions to
be held accountable for their actions. The moral compass of a country with is
virtues and principles is one of the principles of utilitarianism, right, justice,
and caring that should be judged on it character. Ethics of virtue is
associated with justice and the caring, which cultivates by the people in the
organization. When corporate manager conduct themselves in a virtuous, and
ethical manner, the incidence of corruption and unethical behavior diminishes.
The value of multinational corporations comes from the moral
compass of the political administration of the country. During the last eight
years, the Bush administration ignored may international laws and regulations,
in turn so did many of the American corporations. Corruption in this country
was at an all time high during the Bush administration due to its corruption
and dealing with international issues. We ignored the world wide desires for
the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, an international pack, to reduce greenhouse
emissions and fight global warming. It is only due to selling out by various
oil companies and large corporations who spend money on influencing Congress
and that Administration from large contributions to senators and congressmen to
influence the environmental policies. Corruption in the governments of Vietnam,
North Korea, Cuba, and Russia are examples of corrupt governments that
illegally deal with the market economy for their selfish ends. The command
economy is an economic system based on government authority making economic
decisions. Many countries own and control their corporations to further the
countries best interest. China is such a country that controls all of their
corporations. They mandate what pay, human rights and working conditions their
workers are subjected. Unethical behavior by China has given rise to the import
of dog food, cat food, and baby food that is poisonous or contaminated due to
poor quality controls. China recently finished the Three Gorges Dam, but the
dam flooded archeological and cultural sites and displaced 1.3 million people
according to (China Today, May 2010). Their record on human rights has been
controversial. Ethically we should stop trade in China, but cannot due to the
fact such a high percentage of goods is produced overseas today. As the United
States makes the transition from an Industrial based economy to a technological
based economy, many people have to return to school and be retrained for the
jobs that are available today. Many corporations do not provide the funds to
re-educate their workforce as technology changes and evolves on this planet.
The ideology of our belief system has changed over the last few decades.
Businesses have tried to cut cost by outsourcing their manufacturing labor
overseas. The ethical dilemma is that with twenty million manufacturing jobs
being transferred overseas, or outsourcing the Americans that are out of work
are unable to gain employment. Many agricultural and industrial labor jobs that
people were trained and worked for forty years ago are gone. These out of work
people cannot train for computer jobs because this is the only type of work
they are used to. The free market helps dictate what goods are desirable or
popular, but corporations have reduced the money spent on training their
workforce. People want to maintain their liberty and property with a good
paying job, with the Lockean right.
In the United States the distribution of wealth in this new
economy has slid to the far right. The top 1% of corporate America makes over
$10 million a year. The CEOs of fortune 500 companies make four hundred times
the average worker. This incredible profit is largely due to outsourcing to
countries where workers make less than a dollar a day. For workers in third
world countries, there seems to corporations for no need to pay for medical,
dental, or take care of hazardous chemicals, which is mandated by state and
federal law. Many believe that this new competition between corporations is a
social Darwinism, that will create human progress and competitive for
corporations to become more ethical and honest in their international dealings.
Governments should be used as an economic substructure and social
superstructure to monitor the way the economics goods and materials are
utilized by corporations as the forces of production in our economy. If we have
responsible and ethical administration of our resources, corporations will then
be better able to maintain profitability and responsible environmental ethics
for the ecosystems that would help create a perfectly competitive market.
When you apply morality, ethics, and sound environmental policies
that benefit the environment and people, corporations can maintain level of profitability.
There is a lure by corporate greed for price-fixing, manipulation of supplies,
tying arrangements, exclusive dealing arrangements, and price discrimination,
as shown in (Business Ethics, pg 184-185.) There are so many temptations to cut
corners and take the short cuts to overnight increased profitability.
In conclusion, when corporations are ethically managed, its executives,
managers, and employees are morally honest with everyone involved, and the
corporation has increased profitability, confidence and faithful employees.
When you treat people with dignity and respect you get the same in return. When
companies reduce wages, and reduce medical and dental benefits, you alienate
the faith employees, and the desire to work hard and produce the highest
quality product possible. When morality is low due to the feeling that the
company is treating its employees badly, moral will lead to a drop in quality,
and integrity at a corporation. People don’t care anymore about their jobs when
they think the company has stopped carrying. When insurance companies have
raised premiums and rates to all corporations and subscribers, people begin to
hate them and will behave unethically towards them. When our government is
unethical when dealing with the American people, we, in turn, have no respect
for our government. Respect and honesty is a cornerstone for a society, without
it. you will have distrust, anarchy and corruption. Hopefully someday the
peoples of the world will mature, evolve, and grow up to realize we all have to
get along together on this planet, and sometimes honesty is the best policy in
day to day living.
References
Blackburn, S. (2001). Ethics: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, T. (2010, Jan
10). Fraudster feels full wrath of judge; 50-year sentence for $1-billion
theft. The Province .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_business_failures#2009. (n.d.).
Rothbard, M. N.
(1998). The Ethics of Liberty. New York and London: New York
University Press.
Velasquez, M. G.
(2006). Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases 6th Edition. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson Education.
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