1.4 Ethical Principles and Business Ethics

In our first case study we considered an ethical problem in many different ways, from the surface-level aspects to the deeper issues. There were disagreements about all of them. Let’s return to one of those disagreements:

• Some people believe that a business can refuse service to someone on the basis of religious beliefs, while other people believe that businesses can’t refuse service for that reason.

The second side of this disagreement says that businesses cannot refuse service to someone on the basis of the business owner’s religious beliefs. A person who takes this side is probably against the kind of discrimination we see in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case; in fact, they may be against any form of discrimination in a business environment, no matter the reason. Opposition to any form of discrimination in business is a much stronger position than others we’ve considered so far, so let’s think about it a little more. (By “stronger” position, we mean that it’s a position that applies to more cases because it is more general.)

This new position—that discriminating against any person for any reason is always wrong—is an example of an ethical principle. An ethical principle is a general standard for ethical behavior intended to apply broadly, or intended to cover as many cases as possible. This principle is about discrimination, but here are some possible principles for other areas of business:

• Hiring and promotion programs should privilege female and minority candidates.

• The interests of customers always come first.

• Corporations should always act to maximize profit.

• Employees should never steal from their employers under any circumstances.

We could apply these principles in many ethical problems. Principles are useful because they are so general—good ethical principles will apply to many cases and so can guide our behavior in many circumstances. They have enormous practical value.

In this course, we’ll be looking for ethical principles to guide our reasoning and decision-making. Case studies are one method to discover principles, and another method is thinking about what many ethical problems have in common. As we saw in the previous section, many ethical problems involve harm, so it might be helpful to find ethical principles about harm.

Notice, though, that by calling these statements “principles,” we are not saying that therefore they are automatically true. They may be false. A statement is a principle not because it is true but because it has wide application. For example, here’s our discrimination principle again:

• Discriminating against any person for any reason is always wrong.

This statement applies to many cases, and so we can call it a principle. But it does not follow that it is true. In fact, this principle is probably false—is it really the case that we can’t discriminate against anyone, for any reason at all, ever? Can you think of circumstances where discrimination against certain customers could be ethically permissible? What would the limitations be?

A better principle about discrimination might be this one:

• In general, discriminating against people on the basis of protected classes like sex, race, sexual orientation, military history, and so on, is wrong.

This statement isn’t as broad as our other one, but it’s general enough that it’s still an ethical principle. It also seems much more likely to be true. It says discrimination is almost always wrong, while leaving room for situations where discrimination might be ethically permissible—such as discriminating against minors in alcohol sales.