Businesses in the 21st century have to be responsible; they must respond to the legitimate demands of their environment and make commitments to the societies in which they have a presence. They have two very important motives for doing so: conviction and their own interest: conviction because ethics and positive values must constitute the nucleus of their corporate culture; and interest because companies have to relate with an increasingly better-informed and demanding society and therefore need greater legitimacy to successfully engage in their activities in the medium and long term. We need better regulation, but not more regulation. Moreover, we need more principles, more ethics in business and in the finance industry. That is because ethical principles ensure proper conduct in an innumerable number of situations not covered by the law (or not strictly regulated by the authorities responsible for enforcing it). As Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for many years, once said, Âin civilized life, the law floats in a sea of ethics. […]
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Principles necessary for dealing with ethical problems of the Internet are largely based on individual and social principles. I outline the necessary individual, social, and global principles, based on Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Rawls social contract principles of justice. Using these principles, the individual ethical problems of sex on the internet and piracy are discussed. The social ethical problems discussed are the Digital Divide and sales tax on Internet transactions. The global ethical Internet issues considered are Internet free speech, the regulation of websites with global presence, and the role of the Internet in facilitating globalization. […]
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Risk is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Sometimes, risk-taking is considered to be positive, as is sometimes risk-avoidance. This paper investigates the conditions under which risk-taking and risk-avoidance are considered to be positive. It compares the differences in attitude towards risk in American finance capitalism and the Continental European Social Market Economy. It examines the rights of risk-takers and those of risk-avoiders in the population, in which both must be taken into consideration. Risk-takers should not transfer the burden for their financial speculation onto those parts of the population that are risk-averse and disapprove of it. In this perspective, the bail-out of financial institutions by tax-payers is problematic. […]
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Almost 35 years after the birth of the first test tube baby, the controversy surrounding IVF treatment has greatly diminished, yet the ethics of embryology remain complex. What moral status should be accorded to the live human embryo in vitro? More recent discoveries involving cloning have provoked widespread, though not universal, moral outrage. But there are very good reasons for permitting the therapeutic cloning: the possibilities opening up through stem cell research could revolutionize medicine. The future may well bring cloning techniques that remove the need for embryos. Whatever may happen, the undifferentiated cells of the human embryo should be accorded a moral status based on developmental biology. […]
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In this chapter, the embodied and institutionalized roots of gender discrimination in the workplace are explored. The chapter draws on a variety of feminist perspectives to discuss the implications that various approaches to gender differences have for thinking about leadership in organizational contexts. It comes to the conclusion that combining insight into the embodied practices of the lived body with an understanding of gender as a socially-constructed notion may yield the best possible model for thinking about gender within institutions. The chapter ends with an analysis of the systemic leadership approach, which may provide a productive space for conceptualizing a more gender-sensitive understanding of a variety of leadership styles and practices. It also argues for a broader understanding of certain leadership characteristics, such as vision. […]
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The balance of pursuing market opportunities while maintaining accountability and ethical integrity has proved a defining challenge for business enterprise since the arrival of the joint- stock company in the early years of industrialism. The accountability and responsibility of business enterprise is constantly subject to question. The manifest failures of corporate governance and business ethics in the global financial crisis has increased the urgency of the search for a better ethical framework and governance for business. A substantial increase in the range, significance and impact of corporate social and environmental initiatives in recent years suggests the growing materiality of a more ethically-informed approach. However challenging the prospects, there are growing indications of large corporations taking their social and environmental responsibilities more seriously, and of these issues becoming more critical in the business agenda. […]
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All citizens of wealthy, industrialized nations have an obligation to reduce extreme poverty. So why don’t we give more? We’re afraid aid doesn’t work. We’re afraid of the environmental damage brought by increased wealth. We don’t want to renounce our own comfort. But none of these reasons is valid. Aid does work and we have the data to prove it. Furthermore, poverty reduction and environmental protection often coincide, and even when they don’t, there is still a strong moral case for saying that rich nations should cut back on their luxury emissions before poor nations have to reduce their subsistence emissions. Ultimately, it is in our own interest to end extreme poverty, a goal that could be achieved if each one of us were to give up just a fraction of what we own. […]
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In the absence of a global state or global government, international relations are regulated by multiple institutions of global governance that include treaty-based organisations and many formal and informal bodies in global civil society. What ethical constraints are applicable to them? The actors who construct global governance bodies are either states or individuals. Both are subject to rigorous ethical constraints because they are constituted as the actors in two key global practices: the society of sovereign states and global civil society. The values that constrain them in these practices are liberty and diversity. As states and individuals build the institutions of global governance, they are required to promote these two ethical values. […]
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This article provides an overview and analysis of the ethical issues concerning the use of human- enhancement technologies. It begins by explaining the challenge with defining human enhancements, while also proposing a typology of enhancements that problematizes the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Subsequently, it identifies three levels of ethical concern: individual, professional and social. Individual ethical concerns encompass debates about whether the means of achieving goals in life matter, considerations about an authentic life, prudence and promoting an open future, and finally morphological freedom. Professional ethical concerns involve the codes of ethics that govern medical practice and the ethics of cultural practices. Finally, social concerns encompass fairness and justice, the yuck factor, practical ethical issues and the zero-sum objection. Throughout, the paper argues that human enhancement implies a fundamental restructuring of the global economy, bringing about a transformation of how people conduct their lives. […]
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Culture does not exist in a tangible sense, it is a product of our imagination and is only useful in so far as far as it helps us understand and predict phenomena in the real world. National and organizational cultures are quite different phenomena: national cultures belong to anthropology, organizational cultures to sociology.
Management can never change a national culture, it can only understand and use it. It can create and sometimes change an organizational culture. The concept of culture does not apply at the level of individuals. Individuals have personalities, only partly influenced by the culture in which they grew up. […]
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