1.2 Ethics and Business Ethics

Ethics is the study of right and wrong. Business ethics is the study of right and wrong in business and professional environments.

Easy enough, right?

But ethics involves a lot more than just right and wrong, and so business ethics does too. We also care about why we judge certain things to be right or wrong, and how those judgments affect our behavior. Not only do we want to know why we think it’s wrong to discriminate in hiring, for example, we also want to know how we can implement less discriminatory hiring practices in our organizations.

Those questions may look like ordinary ones that many business professionals ask and answer every day. But when we start to pay attention to the details and the decisions resulting from them, we’ll find that there’s a lot more to talk about than we realized—and all of it factors into how we think about ethical situations and how we conduct ourselves in the workplace.

Taking a practical approach to business ethics means to focus on principles and then to apply them in practice. And that’s the approach we’ll take in this course.

Let’s get started!