Business Ethics Case

Business Ethics Case

What is the business’s obligation to build an ethical culture and balance its desire for profit with ethical responsibilities to employees, customers, society, and the environment?

The ethical culture in business can be built by applying ethics that evaluate ethical principles and morals that occur in the business environment. Ethical culture in business relates to all aspects of business conduct as well as employees, customers, and society behavior. When making a decision businesses have to analyze the effect on society. Many years before, decisions were made based on a cost-benefit study in which social responsibility was not the principle. Nowadays, organizations manage a high degree of social responsibility and use theories such as maximizing profits, moral minimum, stakeholder interest, and corporate citizenship.

The theory of maximizing profits is when a corporation works to increase profits for shareholders such as suppliers, employees, and residents of the community in which business are located. Moral minimum is a complement of the former theory which states that corporations must make a profit while evading harming others. Stakeholder interest is a social responsibility theory that focuses on the effect of its actions towards customers, employees, creditors, suppliers and the local community. The last theory is corporate citizenship that examines how businesses help to the community. Corporate citizenship contends that corporations have the social responsibility to educate, support, and improve the wellbeing of the community.

Creating an ethical culture based in these theories of social responsibility makes it easier for corporations to act ethically in the conduct of their affairs and relate to the United States law.

Miguel buys a truck in Texas, and then moves to Washington. A year later, he is driving his truck in Oklahoma, and causes an accident by running into another car, whose driver is...