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Ethics And Ethics Of Business Ethics

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In 2001, Enron a Houston-based commodities energy and service corporation kept huge debts off the balance sheets. This resulted in shareholders losing $74 billion, thousands of employees and investors losing their retirement accounts and many employees lost their jobs (Accounting-Degree.org, 2015). Crane and Matten (2010) argue “After all, despite many years of business ethics being researched and taught in colleges and universities, ethics problems persist and the public remains sceptical of the ethics of business”. The big problem we face is that ethical standards are declining because of insider trading of stocks and bonds, bribery, falsifying documents, deceptive advertising, defective products, employee theft and questionable activities (Ferrell, Fraedrich, and Ferrell, 2001). So why, do businesses continue to make these unethical decision when we universities teach ethics? In this essay we will discuss what ethics is, why people have trouble making ethical decisions, why should we teach ethics and why the public still remain sceptical about business ethics.

What is ethics?
Ethics is defined by Oxforddictionaries.com (2015) as “moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.” There is no such thing as an ethic when we are born. We are taught ethical behaviours by our parents at a young age through religion, household values and the environment around us. As we learn and grow our morals and ethics change and we learn that there is no

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