Goodrich Case

Question 1: “Ethics has no place in business.” Discuss this statement.

Is it true that ethics does not have a place in business? Are business ethics or profits more important? In my opinion, it totally depends to whom you are asking this question. Are you asking it to the owner or the president of the company, the shareholders or the people who live just a little downstream from the factory? If you ask a person who was diagnosed with a cancer, which is closely associated with one or more toxins being released by the factory that was built just upstream from them, I am sure you would get the answer “Business ethics” do not exist. Business in its nature is meant to win the competition, and attract as many people as possible on buying their products for as long, and for as much, as possible, and with totally no regards to the after-effects of their products or the processes involved in making their products".

Even if a company is taking any initiative to improve or eliminate the toxins that they already released into the river or air, they are either doing it because they were ordered to do so by a judge or other higher authority or because there was a problem in the first place. If they are costing hundreds of thousands' of peoples their livelihoods, do you think that they will stop, and stop making billions of dollars a year in the process? Not a chance. Ethics has no place in business. The most ethical of all businesses is bankrupt, because an immoral company bought it in an aggressive takeover.

Hence, the question rises again, are profits more important than ethics? Unfortunately in business, the answer have to be a yes but in society, the answer is no. Of course, with the Earth facing the Green-House gasses effect, the depletion of the ozone layer, the melting ice caps, oceans turned into dumping grounds whereby it has already faced with marine species extinction, companies have become more ethical. Some might reach a certain degree...