Business Ethics

Business Ethics

Lecture 1

0. Introduction

CSR = corporate social responsibility

Any ethics is an evaluation of good-bad. If something is bad – to do this is wrong. All these are connected.

* Normative ethics – we evaluate things. Instrument of evaluation.

* Positive ethics – we do not evaluated, we explain why other people evaluate things, why the sociality does behave like this.

* Instrumental ethics – we know what is good, we know how it really is, we see that some people behave badly – we need some policies, instruments to make people behave ethically. Before we do this, we should decide what is good and what is bad.

General ethics – fundamental ethics.

Medical/Business/Legal ethics are based on one discipline. Difference is in area of application

We can evaluate individual/particular actions, or a set of norms (systems).

1. Utilitarianism

General idea: analyze/evaluate consequences; see what will happen in the future

Main ideology of Raskolnilov: if we kill someone and the whole world wins – let’s kill him

Types:

* Strong version (we can measure the utility in units and we can change the utility, compare utilities, redistribute)

* Will the total amount of utility/happiness in the world increase?

* Indefinite (ex: we cannot compare gains and non-economic losses [quantity of dead people]. O the one hand…, on the other hand…)

* Better/improvement (we increase general amount of happiness, even if some people suffer)

* Worse (we decrease general amount of happiness, even if some people suffer)

* Weak version (utilities are non-comparable, we cannot compare, someone wins – someone loses, but we can’t measure happiness)

* Non-comparable (someone wins, but if хоть someone loses)

* Improvement (only winners may compensate losers)

Lecture 4

2. Deontology

End of the action = purpose of the action

MINMAX – maximize the minimum utility of the society

* Golden rule –...