one’s behavior is morally defensible only if everyone else could do
the same thing without interfering with the optimal functioning of an organized society
●
Ten Commandments sort of analysis
●
Immanuel Kant
●
Treat others as you would wish to be treated
Aristotelian Virtue Ethics Approach: concentrates more on the actor attempting to become a virtuous
person in all aspects rather than on the resolution of specific ethical issues

●
each person should focus on developing and practicing important virtues such as honesty, integrity,
truthfulness, reliability and so on. If a person embodies these virtues, the decisions he/she makes will
likely be good ones
Moral Minimum: set of general standards that constitute the ethical minimum necessary for the
functioning of civilization.
Honesty, Loyalty, Keeping Commitments, Doing No Harm
Moral Reasoning and Decision Making:
1.
Narrowly define Issues
2.
Identify governing principles
3.
Apply governing principles to facts and circumstances
4.
Make defensible decision
Moral Relativism:
asks you to look at ethics and compare and contrast.
●
it's possible to have different ethical constructs based on where and what you’re doing
Moral Pluralism:
looks for commonalities- where do we have ethical constructs that overlap?
Businesses can fall into 1 or 4 categories:
●
ethical and legal
●
unethical and illegal
●
legal but unethical
●
illegal but ethical
Chapter 37: Business Ethics and Individual Decision Making:
Types of Ethical Actors:
●
Active knowing wrongdoers who know that they are doing wrong and are active proponents of the fraud
●
Passive but knowing wrongdoers who realize at some level they are involved in the wrongdoing but
persist often because of pressure from their superiors or their peers. Not initiators of fraudulent scheme
but don’t do anything to stop it
●
People who are important to the fraud but are unaware of the wrongdoing they’re involved in
Social & Organizational Pressures and Ethical Decision Making:
●
Obedience to Authority
○
acceptability heuristic- people often judge whether their decision is right based on whether it will be
acceptable to their superiors
●
Conformity Bias
(theory of social proof)- in our decision making, we have a bias toward conforming to
the actions and standards we perceive to be accepted by our peers
○
people more likely to undertake unethical actions in workplace and elsewhere if peers are engaging in
similar behavior
●
Groupthink
: impairment of individual decision making
○
causes collections of people to make much different decisions than the same people would make
individually
○
Group decisions more extreme than the median decision that members would make individually

●
False Consensus Effect:
tendency to believe that other people think the same way we do
Cognitive Heuristics and Biases and Ethical Decision Making:
●
Fundamental Attribution Error-
all tend to attribute the good things that we do to our “soul being”. When


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- Spring '08
- BREDESON
- Law, Ethics, The American, Supreme Court of the United States, Shared Ethics