What is ethics?
Ethics can generally be defined as the principles of morally acceptable conduct of individuals. Ethics also means an individual’s personal beliefs about right and wrong behaviours.
Although this simple definition communicates the essence of ethics, three implications warrant additional consideration: a. Ethics is individually defined. People have ethics, whereas organisations do not have it;
b. What constitutes ethical behaviour can vary from one person to another; and
c. Ethics is relative; it is not absolute. This means that although what constitutes ethical behaviour is in the eye of the beholder, it usually conforms to generally acceptable social norms.
While ethics generally refers to the conception of right and wrong (Lawrence & Weber, 2011), business ethics refers to the application of ethical values and ideas on issues that arise in the business context. It is not different from ethics in general. For example, if we consider lying to be unethical, then anyone in business who lies about his products or financial performance of his company to his stakeholders is acting unethically as well.
Do you know what professional ethics is? Let us refer below to know its meaning.Professional ethics indicates the moral values that a group of similarly trained people develop to control their task performance or their use of resources.People internalise the rules and values of their professional culture just as they do those of their society. They reflexively adhere to professional rules and values when deciding on how to behave.
Some organisations have many groups of professional employees such as nurses, lawyers, researchers, doctors and accountants, whose behaviour is governed by professional ethics. Professional ethics help to shape the organisation’s culture and determine the values of its members in their dealings with other stakeholders. Most professional groups are allowed to enforce the ethical