1.9 Making Business Ethics Practical

Let’s finish this chapter by reviewing what we mean by “practical” business ethics.

For business ethics to be practical, it must give us comprehensible guidance that we can act on in order to change our future behaviors or justify current ones. This is why we’ll have so many case studies and consider so many real-world questions about what you would do and for what reasons. For most professionals, a business ethics framework that doesn’t help us make better decisions isn’t really worth having. It might be fun to talk about, but it isn’t useful.

We’ve seen that a big part of reasoning through ethical problems is having a method. No matter the quality of the method, though, it will make no difference to us unless we know how to use it. We have to practice using the method—we need to accustom ourselves to perceiving the ethically relevant aspects of a situation and then to thinking through our behavior in order to follow ethical principles and realize our values.

In this way, you might think of ethics as a matter of becoming a better person. In reality, practical business ethics is a matter of making better decisions, by using more and better information, based on better and clearer principles. You might run your business according to the principle that you wish to give back to the community; you might run it with the idea that you are changing the world or somehow making it a better place. But unless those principles have justifications and lead to actions, they’re just whims, not principles. They’re more like wishes, and you will force them to ride in the back seat as you give priority to other principles or values that you actually do act on. Business ethics involves theories, principles, and other abstract points, but practical business ethics is about decisions and actions by real people, in the real world.

Making decisions in these ways involves reasoning about arguments, and that too is something we can practice. It might sound unusual to think of practicing something like reasoning, but practice is what we need. Just as you get better at shooting a basketball or playing the piano by practicing those things, you get better at reasoning by practicing as well. And since you can make better decisions by reasoning better, you’ll also end up making better decisions by practicing reasoning.

Here are some specific, practical skills you will improve at as a result of this course:

• You will get better at noticing when ethical problems arise in business environments, either in your own actions or in those of others.

• You will get better at understanding what information is relevant to ethical problems, and why.

• You will get better at reasoning through ethical problems, discovering the principles they involve, and justifying and refining those principles.

• You will get better at creating, strengthening, criticizing, and evaluating arguments.

• You will get better at presenting those arguments to other people.

Those are some useful skills! All of them will make an actual difference in your behavior and will be valuable to you as a professional in any line of work.

That’s a practical approach to business ethics. We’ll keep it going in the next chapter, on business and ethical theories.