1.5 Why Do We Need Business Ethics?
We can already see why we need business ethics: since so many people disagree about right and wrong in so many different ways, we can’t always avoid those disagreements in business settings. We need business ethics to navigate the differences of opinion.
Ethical problems can arise in any field of business, from entrepreneurship and accounting to human resources, management, sales, strategy, marketing, and supply chain operation. Whatever field you are in, whatever role you perform in your organization, you will encounter ethical problems. Training in business ethics will help you identify the problems, evaluate them, consider ethical principles, and make good choices.
Let’s check out another case study to see how a mundane-looking situation can still raise an ethical problem. Though this one isn’t real, it describes an experience many people have had in retail environments.
Francesca’s employer is Speedy Diesel and Food, a truck stop and gas station just off a major highway. Her duties include working the sales floor, running the cash register and point of sale interactions, and cleaning the store. Francesca works eight-hour shifts with a thirty-minute break in the middle.
One of Speedy Diesel’s most popular products is the Speedy Burrito, which employees make by putting frozen burritos on a roller grill and heating them. Once the burritos reach the proper temperature, company policy says that they may remain on the grill for four hours. After four hours, employees are to discard them and start heating new burritos.
Photo by adoproducciones via Pixabay.
Most days, Speedy Diesel sells dozens of burritos, and they never stay on the grill for longer than an hour. But when the store is slow, some burritos hit the four-hour limit, and employees must throw them away.
When it’s almost time for Francesca’s break, she will sometimes check to see if any burritos have been heating for more than four hours. If they have, she pretends to put them in the trash but instead wraps them in napkins. When her break begins, she takes the old burritos outside and eats them.
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Is it right or wrong for Francesca to eat the old burritos? Why?
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Does Francesca’s taking the burritos count as theft?
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Do companies have ethical obligations toward the way they dispose of still-usable food or drink products? Why or why not?
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Are there any ethical principles to discover in considering Francesca’s case?
Francesca’s case doesn’t just have to be about food—you may have faced similar decisions for other small items like pens or paper, or even for larger ones too. We could have disagreements over whether Speedy Diesel still owns the discarded food and whether a manager could fire Francesca for her actions. In these disagreements and others, we would be using ethical reasoning to figure out the best things to do.
Some people believe that it’s in a business’s best financial interest to be ethical. If that were true we would therefore have no need for business ethics, because what is ethical and what is profitable would align. We will discuss this idea in Chapter 3, but you may already see problems with it. For one, it may sometimes be in a business’s financial interest to cheat or deceive, especially when it is not in a position to suffer legal or reputational consequences. In addition, by equating financial interest with ethical permissibility, we make it seem as if there is no difference between the two. That isn’t right. Doing something because it is ethical is different from doing it because it is profitable. Actions taken for those different reasons are not the same.
We’ll close this section by commenting on the term “morality.” It’s common to talk about business ethics but rare to talk about business morality. For most people, ethics has to do with rules for guiding behavior in interpersonal settings, such as the workplace. In contrast, morality tends to be about personal convictions or virtues. Understood this way, ethics and morality share some common features but are not the same.1
Although there’s room for disagreement here, our course will stick to terms like ethics, business ethics, and ethical principles.