Ethics at Work (Neteffect Series)

This easy-to-understand book presents insightful discussion of practical business issues in today¿s workplace. KEY TOPICS: It contains numerous examples, and real-world case studies and questions that illustrate dilemmas learners can practice resolving. MARKET: For any and all professionals focused on ethics in business.

Tell a friend or neighbor that you are working on a book about ethics in business, and the response—unless they think you're a scoundrel—is liable to be something like, "It's about time someone did," or "Goodness knows, it's needed." Tell a person who is in the business of teaching business ethics, and the response is more likely to be, "Why add another one to the field?"

There are many excellent books on the topic of ethics in business. Some of those books are written by professionals (i.e., professors of ethics or business) for professionals. Some are written by professionals for laypeople. Some are written by laypeople for fellow laypeople. And some books are written for students in courses on business ethics.

Ethics at Work is written for readers who are, or may expect to be, in the business world. It presumes that the readers will not have previously taken an ethics course. In that sense, it is introductory. This book aims to provide the reader with material (ideas, manners of reasoning, ways of looking at things—"tools," if you will) that will assist him or her in making ethical decisions, and becoming a better person.

Not that this book will make good guys out of bad guys. No ethics book can do that on its own. Golf lessons for someone who doesn't care about playing golf won't accomplish much either. But, if the reader comes to this book with the willingness to improve his or her ability to live and act ethically in an often complex and challenging work environment, then this book should help—it is meant to help—in achieving that goal.

Given the target audience of this book, certain choices were made regarding its style and format.

• Every attempt was made to present the material in a reader-friendly manner. I have tried to meet the readers where they are—at least where I think they are—rather than to ask, or require, them to enter into a special field of study with its own distinctive setting, structure, and terminology.
• This book is purposely short on names, dates, labels, and -isms. The reader will encounter some classical ethical viewpoints, to be sure, but the aim here is not to teach the history of ethics. Personally, I believe that names, dates, and labels will likely distract from the issues at hand, but reasonable people may disagree about that.
• Ethics at Work begins by considering a number of theoretical and meta-ethical issues (though it certainly doesn't say it that way), and then moves on both to normative ethics and to a version of virtue ethics. A companion work, the Participant's Guide, consists of scenarios and exercises that give readers the opportunity to put some of these concepts to work. It is not necessary, however, to use the two texts together. Ethics at Work itself contains both pre- and post-chapter questions that are meant to engage the reader with respect to the concepts that have been introduced.
• The book is full of questions. They occur at the beginning and end of each chapter. Moreover, under the rubric "Think About It," they appear throughout the chapters as well. The intent of the chapter "Warm-up" and "Think About It" questions is both to stimulate and to guide thinking. They are questions about the subject matter at hand, but not "about" it in the sense of being test questions to determine whether or not the reader has mastered the material. The "Wrap-up" questions at the end of each chapter do have correct or "best" answers, based on the content of the chapter. While they could be used as tests, their primary purpose is to help summarize key concepts within the chapters.

A brief word is in order regarding the cartoons in this book. While there has been an attempt to locate them in chapters to which they might have a particular relevance, no one should push this idea too far. The cartoons do not necessarily support or reflect on a specific point of view under discussion. Please, don't ask what they mean or why they are there—just enjoy them. They are for fun. The topic of ethics is serious business, but reading, studying, or talking about it need not be grim.

Ethics at Work is based on the idea that business ethics involves applying general ethical principles to the particular and often complex situations that arise in business. This is a widely, but not universally, held view. There are those who would maintain that business ethics is, in some manner or other, sui generis—that it is not just (just!) the application of general ethical principles to business situations. Certainly, an interesting debate can be carried on regarding this matter, but an introductory level book is not the proper venue for that debate. Nor is its preface.

Ethics at Work avoids a particular ethical point of view. Yet one could always argue that the text does adopt a position—the position Richard De George has called moral pluralism. The text presents many points of view through a summary of the analysis it does provide.

The ethical approaches reviewed here all have strengths and weaknesses. None is perfect. So when you have a tough decision to make, you should look at it from a variety of perspectives (some of which you might not have considered before reading this book), and then you have to decide what is going to guide you in that situation. There's no guarantee that you will wind up doing the right thing. But it's more likely that you will, and you will certainly turn out to be a better person—because you tried to be—than if you had simply acted without reflection.

If readers come away with a larger and better set of tools for making ethical decisions than they had before, and an increased willingness to use them, then this book will have succeeded.