Business and Personal Ethics

Business and Personal Ethics

Business activities have evolved into business ethics. It sets the foundation for certain moral restrictions and boundaries on the company regarding how it handles employees’ welfare and responds to societal needs and demands. Consequently, it stipulates that all the business functions and processes must be kept under the employees’ needs and societal welfare and expectations because the latter plays a crucial role in businesses by providing it with the right environment for conducting business (Corporate Finance Institute, 2020). The critical business purpose is corporate social responsibility aimed at creating harmony and bringing shared prosperity in the society, rather than just having a money-minting motive.  Consequently, a business has to be accountable for violating the societal basics. Business ethics will lead to legitimate practices, and hence legal and regulatory compliance.

Secondly, the business and business practitioners who are bound within the ethical and moral restrictions will eliminate practices and behaviors like illegal use of capital for blackmailing competitors and stakeholders, black marketing, rudeness, imprudence, and pride. The result will be social stability. Personal ethics concerns the personal belief on right and wrong (Mintz, 2018). It is a category of ethics that emanates from the conscience of an individual. However, it also overlaps with legal and business ethics since it impacts all life’s aspects, including relationships, work, finances, and family. Though rarely incorporated by philosophical institutions as a formal philosophical investigations area, the history of the discipline has had many works addressing various concepts concerning guides to good living and choices at the level of a person, and how these values relate to religion, culture, politics, and health, etc.

Personal ethics regards such topics as friendship, love, marriage, eating habits, religious practices like prayer and fasting, solitude and privacy, time management, and devotion, amongst others. Philosophers like Robert Nozick, Iris Murdoch, Erasmus, Hobbes, and Cicero, etc. wrote guides on good personal well beings and their achievement methods. However, the core domain of personal ethics is the knowledge of when to treat a matter as private or public and hence act on it appropriately. For instance, consider a situation in which a Russian travels to England and starts acting rudely in the English market. Is it right to view the rudeness or politeness as entirely personal, or is it public in the sense that it is an accurate representation of Russia?

Is politeness a small or great virtue in the sense that it is just an act of a person’s need to be cordial and move along, or it reflects truth concerning our overall vices and virtues? Do we reveal our real values on our voting or what we do economically or when we become guests or when we are with friends or when we are alone? All these questions are still subject to substantially heated debates. The topic of personal ethics is a highly controversial one, and the discussion could continue for an infinite number of years before any consensus is reached.

Understanding personal ethics is only possible based on the three categories of ethics, including rule-based, duty-based, and virtue-based approaches. For instance, consider an individual who is non-sexist and non-racist based on their belief that being either is not cool. Would the individual join in when their friends start making sexist and racist remarks? Is it right or wrong to become friends with a self-destructive, selfish, and cruel person? Are friendship, marriage, and love duties? The answers to all these questions are profoundly personal and depend on their beliefs and values. Furthermore, personal ethics are guides and inform individual codes of conduct.

My Personal Code of Ethics

My code of ethics originates from behavioral rules that I developed throughout my upbringing as observed and reinforced in me by my parents, peers and society, secular philosophy, and religion. Others reflect my nationality and geographical location. Consequently, it is an amalgam that reflects a classic example of the Golden Rule- I do unto others according to what I would want them to do unto me. Secondly, I rely on deontological ethics, consequentialist ethics, or virtue-based ethics, whenever appropriate, to determine right and wrong.

My code of ethics includes:

• Striving to achieve my ambitions
• Love my family and friends
• Vegetarianism
• Maintenance and support for non-sexism and non-racism
• Responsibility acceptance
• The pursuit of excellence and honor
• Personal integrity, transparency, and accountability
• Incremental or continuous improvement

I also commit always to maintain my treatment of others with great civility, refrain engaging in violence with another and respect others, their life, and property, all of which consist of my code of conduct. In a nutshell, I shall always rely on my ethics to resolve any ethical dilemma that I find myself in.