The Power of Ethics in Decision Making

The world is full of unethical people. We see examples of bad ethics every day both in real life and in entertainment such as mainstream music, television and movies. It is starting to become somewhat normal which is scary to think about. Some of the biggest scandals of our time have evolved around unethical practices, most notably Enron. So many bad situations could be avoided if people just did what was right and acted ethically.

As we learned in class Wednesday, just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical and just because it’s ethical doesn’t make it legal. This is somewhat of a catch 22 and leaves people with a grey area, wondering how something can be both right and wrong at the same time. How can something be legal and unethical? This is a very good question, although I am not sure I am capable of answering it because I wonder the same thing.

The practices of Enron were both illegal and unethical, the same holds true for various other companies. Wal-Mart, one of the biggest consumer stores in the nation, is another company that has been accused of unethical practices along with Nestle, Capital One and Nike in certain parts of the world. There are three questions you must ask yourself when you are unsure of the ethical validity of an issue. Those being: Is it legal? Is it balanced? Is it right? If the answer to any of those questions is “no” than more than likely it is unethical.

Ethics is necessary in every aspect of life but in different ways. There are personal ethics, which is your value system rooted in the way you were raised; professional ethics, a code of ethics developed by those in the field; and business ethics, those rooted out of company beliefs and value system. Good ethics are necessary in business for many reasons. For one, no one trusts or wants to do business with an unethical company, ultimately resulting in the loss of business and credibility. The two most important aspects of a business; without your customers trust and money you have nothing. A lot of businesses get greedy and so caught up in the money making aspect of things they lose sight of reality and the bigger picture. This is where they end up failing and it can end up costing the business everything.

Ethics, good ethics, should always drive decision making; if it does it will show in the business’ results. Some of the World’s Most Ethical Companies of 2010 include American Express, General Electric Co., Adobe Systems and Ford Motor Company an award given to companies with leading ethics and compliance programs. Companies should be striving to get onto this list instead of striving to only make money. Having good ethics goes a long way and will always pay off in the end.

-Alisha Mychele