A Proper Approach to Business Ethics

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Welcome to Business Ethics For Real, a resource for business people who take business ethics seriously.

Ethical behaviour is an important aspect of achieving personal success and business success. This is the issue that will be explored in this forum, particularly as it relates to business-related issues.

A realist approach to business ethics begins with the facts of reality and an acceptance that an objective reality exists. That which exists, including us, exists in reality. And everything that exists, including us, has a specific nature. To live our lives successfully, we must discover the requirements of how to achieve success based on the nature of human beings and their requirements, and how we must interact with everything else that exists in this world. Achieving success in life is, essentially, a scientific affair. Ethics, too, is essentially a scientific matter.

The task of defining the principles of rational living falls to the science of philosophy; more specifically, to the branch of philosophy known as ethics.

Because ethical principles are universal and apply to all people at all times, they apply to people engaged in productive work as entrepreneurs, professionals, business leaders, managers, and salaried employees, both in the private and public sectors. Ethical principles are applicable to all people engaged in voluntary trade.

While this seems obvious, when it comes to thinking about ethics, most people think that there is a separate ethics for people who are associated with business organizations that is different from the ethics of other types of organizations, such as governments or voluntary associations. That there is a multiplicity of ethics is a prevailing social myth.

"Business" is a higher level concept that describes a relationship between people, as do the concepts "hospital," "university," "union," or "government." Each of these organizations are composed of invididual people working and acting together to achieve particular ends. The type of organizations themselves, while they may have specific purposes that define their reason for being, do not have ethical obligations. Ethical obligations apply only to people, without which there are not businesses, hospitals, universities, unions, governments, etc.

BE4R takes a scientific approach to ethics. If ethics is to be meaningful and valid, its validation must be based in reality. Like any science. to be objective and relevant to humans, ethics must reject mysticism, superstition, and delusional fantasy as a valid foundation for establishing ethical principles. On the critically important topic of ethics, we must have the courage and discipline to move beyond the dark ages of willful ignorance to shining light of a new renaissance of reason and science in defining human affairs.

If ethics is to have any value at all to human life, we can only discover it through the application of reason and logic. And if we are to make use of ethics in business as a means to contribute to human happiness and success in the pursuit of values, ethics must be inextricably linked to reality, and be capable of integration into the goals of business practitioners.

Just as reason and reality are the basic building blocks of business success, so should an approach to ethics be built from the same foundations.

Hopefully BE4R can contribute to an understanding of ethics as it pertains to issues of business and commerce, and become a valuable forum for business executives and practitioners to consider ethical issues from a practical, philosophical perspective.