Ethical Issues

Ethical Issues

This paper will state some of the ethical issues within today’s business environment that affect the community and organizations as well as defining the ethics of business. According to several publications, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, ethics is the study of moral standards or a system of moral principles governing the appropriate conduct for a person or group. When the word business is added to it, there are even more meanings. Business ethics are written or unwritten rules, policies and principles that businesses manage the events that take place every day inside the organization, the world, and the connections among the company and the client. Ethical behavior in business is behavior consistent with the principles, norms, and standards of business practice that have been agreed upon by society (Trevino & Nelson, 2007, p. 16). The two views of business ethics through different types of enterprises are descriptive and prescriptive. According to Gill (2005), a descriptive enterprise is one that investigates the understanding and explaining of how people and organizations make their ethical judgments and decisions. In a prescriptive enterprise, the ethics of business tend to seek for the justifiable and right judgments of business concerns in ways of business practices.

Many ethical issues within today’s business environment cause an affect the community and organizations such as the privacy of personal information, conflict of interest, and discrimination. The privacy of personal information is not that any longer, private. Nowadays, people have to disclose personal information to companies and with the expertise of information technology, an individual’s personal information is easy accessible. Because it is so easy to access one’s personal information it becomes a threat to an individual’s privacy. Employees should have limited access to an individual’s personal information and that information is guarded so that it does not end in...