Question

Qns1.a Define Ethics as an academic discipline and briefly discuss its main divisions.

b.  What is business ethics? And what are the ethical theories associated with the discipline.

Answer 1

Ethics refer to the standards or to the framework which are framed as the acceptable forms of behavior on the basis of which the individual is expected to act and perform.

Ethics as an academic discipline can be defined as the knowledge area involved in the determination and analysis of various actions, in the light of ethical standards and ethical values in order to judge between right and wrong and encourage the decision which reflects morality and ethical basis.

This area of field applies the ethical principles to the academical concepts and helps reflect on the different values of integrity , honesty, genuinity, reasonability and morality.

The ethics as an academic discipline helps formulate a perspective based on ethical grounds and aims to influence behaviour of the learner so that they make right choices based on the ethical judgement.

The main divisions of ethics are

Virtue ethics, Deontology, and Consequentialism.

Virtue ethics refers to the division of ethics which emphasizes the role of a character where in any act whether moral or immoral constitutes the character of the person meaning thereby the character of individual should be considered and looked upon to judge whether the action was immoral or moral.

Deontology : This divisions believes that whether the actions being performed by individuals is moral or not, will be decided by the duties being performed or not. So here morality of action is based on whether the obligation is discharged or whether the duty is fulfilled.

Consequentialism: this is the division where a decision will be called ethical if its end results are beneficial and ptiducing maximum good. So morality here is based on consequences or end results an action yields so if it produces greater good at the end , it will be ethical.

Business ethics refers to the application of ethical principles, moral standards and ethical values to the corporate culture and business practices to carry the daily operations in most ethical manner. Business ethics is a discipline involving applying the concepts and theories of ethics to the business setting in order to judge between the right and wrong decisions to be taken by management.

The theories associated with this discipline are :

Utilitarianism : The theory believes that a decision is ethically correct as long as it benefits a larger section of the society . In other words , the morality of action is determined by larger benefit or lesser ill it produces.

Kantian Ethics : The theory is a part of deontological division of ethics thus says that an act is ethical as long as it's duty or obligation towards the society or on part of his position is fulfilled or satisfied. It also holds the ethics based on its universal law of categorical imperative as per which " an act is ethical if while performing so, the individual will want it to become a universal law, at the same time not invalidating its reasonability" e.g if a student cheats in exam, then he should not find it inappropriate if cheating becomes universal law and practiced by all , thus proving that cheating is unethical as it invalidates its significance while making it a universal law.

Virtue Ethics : Being so part of normative ethics, this theory holds that a decision whether good or bad is not decided by its ultimate consequence or result but by the virtue of man i.e by the nature or character of the person performing it. So whether an act was good or bad depends on the character of an individual who as per ethics is encouraged to perform in a virtuous manner.

Rights theory :

The theory says that the rights of individuals in a society are considered as demonstrating high morality and are given high priority by both people as well as law, thus these rights should be considered as acceptable forms of brhaviour and thus morally correct. Since a large amount of population endorses these rights their compliance should be considered ethical similarly violation should be considered unethical.

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