By Laura Pampel, 13341 (2013)
Abstract
The following article gives an overview about ethics in the tourism industry and the different possibilities for teaching business ethics. And you can find two examples from practice. The first example is the decision making process for visiting Myanmar or not and the second example is taken from the philosophy of the Lindner Hotels and Resorts AG.
Introduction – Defining Business Ethics
Before we start the journey to the question and its answer, we have to define what ethics is all about, because if you do not know what ethics or especially business ethics wants to tell us, you cannot think about ethics in tourism. I want to start with two definitions of ethics: “Ethics is concerned with the study of morality and the application of reason to elucidated specific rules and principles that determine right and wrong for a given situation” (Crane and Matten, 2010: 8). A second possibility to define ethics is according to Cordeiro (2003: 265) “ethics is a value system by which individuals evaluate and judge the behaviors of themselves and others”. Lewis came in 1985 to a point, where he said that ethics are ancient, but the question of business ethics is relevant. He said “However the term business ethics is not adequately defined. The typical definitions refer to the rightness or wrongness of behavior, but not everyone agrees on what is morally right or wrong, good or bad, ethical or unethical” (Lewis, 1985: 377). Crane and Matten (2010) found a definition, they are saying “business ethics is the study of business situations, activities and decisions, where issues of right and wrong are addressed” (p.5). In general try to act like the following “act as that you treat humanity, both your own person or in the person of any others always as a purpose and never merely as a resource” (Kant, 1986).
In these turbulent times have the people a growing desire for moral orientation (Lehn,
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