The concept of a human or moral right is central to the utilitarian ethical tradition

Related Papers

Abstract: Market liberalisation of legal services is being accompanied by key changes in professional regulation, notably outcome focused regulation, prioritised through risk-assessment and invoking stronger elements of relationship management. These suggest changes in the nature of professionalism. For some at least, market liberalisation in particular threatens to weaken professional ethics.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes that SMEs managers should include a consideration to virtue of human character as a full complement to ethical judgment according to a deontological focus on obligation and duty to act and the utilitarianism focus on consequences. Virtue ethics provide the substantial benefits of applying human character perspective in conjunction with imperfect-act-oriented perspectives. An interactive symbiosis approach is superior in meeting the complex requirements of applied ethics.

Scholars are reexamining the philosophy of existentialism and the manner in which it relates to organizational ethics and leadership. While this recombination is needed, two important communicative concepts are overlooked: Kierkegaard’s leveling and Heidegger’s falling. Kierkegaard and Heidegger considered certain forms of communication (idle talk, gossip, chatter, etc.) as important to the processes of leveling/falling, whereby the individual accepts taken-for-granted objective definitions of the self. This article examines the leveling/falling processes and how they interact with communicative and organizational socialization processes. The imperative for leaders is to recognize how everyday organizational norms can constrain employees and how an existentialist ethic engenders the opportunity for employees to act authentically in business.

This article argues that attempting to overcome moral silence in organizations will require management to move beyond a compliance-oriented organizational culture toward a culture based on integrity. Such cultural change is part of good corporate governance that aims to steer an organization to enhance creativity and moral excellence, and thus organizational value. Governance mechanisms can be either formal or informal. Formal codes and other internal formal regulations that emphasize compliance are necessary, although informal mechanisms that are based on relationship-building are more likely to achieve moral excellence. Such a shift can be viewed as a transformative strategy for overcoming the destructive side effects and business risks of the tendency within corporate cultures to remain mute when faced with issues that violate personal or corporate values. Genuine dialogues and appropriate ethical decision-making training can deepen the understanding and create a mindful awareness (of ethical values) and induce trust that embrace both complying with rules and regulations, as well as inciting creative “ethical innovation” with respect to human interaction in multinational companies.

Current organizations are underpinned by utilitarian ethics of Modernity. Pure economic motive driven organizations detach themselves from larger societal interest. Rising number of corporate scandals and intraor-ganizational income inequalities are breeding similar trends in society at large. Current organizations base their competitive advantage on resources and capabilities which boils down to economic supremacy at all cost whether it is named I/O or RBV of the firm. This theoretical article posits Ethics-based Trust as the main competency and capability for attaining sustained competitive advantage. It in no way condemns utility view of the firms but treats it as a natural yet secondary outcome of genuine ethicality of the firm. Cultivating an ethical culture in the firm through identifying antecedents, organizational practices, and the outcomes where profitability is an automatic but secondary outcome under the supremacy of ethics is detailed in the multilevel model presented in this article. The main call of this article is to posit ethics and morality over and above short-term profits so that organizations fulfill their trustee role for society through enacting socio-humanistic theories within organizations. A brief analysis of the proposed ethical theory of firm is undertaken in light of the ''schooling'' notion in the contemporary organization theory literature.

Several leadership and ethics scholars suggest that the transformational leadership process is predicated on a divergent set of ethical values compared to transactional leadership. Theoretical accounts declare that deontological ethics should be associated with transformational leadership while transactional leadership is likely related to teleological ethics. However, very little empirical research supports these claims. Furthermore, despite calls for increasing attention as to how leaders influence their followers' perceptions of the importance of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) for organizational effectiveness, no empirical study to date has assessed the comparative impact of transformational and transactional leadership styles on follower CSR attitudes. Data from 122 organizational leaders and 458 of their followers indicated that leader deontological ethical values (altruism, universal rights, Kantian principles, etc.) were strongly associated with follower ratings of transforma-tional leadership, while leader teleological ethical values (utilitarianism) were related to follower ratings of trans-actional leadership. As predicted, only transformational leadership was associated with follower beliefs in the stakeholder view of CSR. Implications for the study and practice of ethical leadership, future research directions, and management education are discussed.

The authors of this paper believe that scholarly work on knowledge management (KM) has largely overlooked ethical considerations. As such, this paper argues for the infusion of ethical considerations into knowledge management (KM) research. Using the lens of the classical ethical theories in philosophy, this paper revisits key areas of KM—knowledge creation, storage and access, transfer, and application—and generates relevant research questions in each of these areas. The paper highlights the importance of examining ethical issues related to KM, and offers an illustrative set of ethically-informed research themes and questions that can potentially be investigated by future studies.

It is widely held in the corporate environment that strategic deception is a legitimate strategic tool and means of competition. Organizations rarely pause to identify by-standing stakeholders such as customers and suppliers that could be victims of strategic deception. Why should deceptive strategies be good for organizations yet unacceptable in most peoples‘ private lives? Many CEOs execute deceptive strategies that they would not if they were to apply a personal ethics framework. Beyond the ethical concerns, there are issues regarding the moral conduct of corporations while interacting with employees and other stakeholders, disproportionate use of the commons and pushback against rules and norms that would sustain the environment. While this problem has persisted, with corporate ethics consistently falling short of expectations, business scholars seem to be disconnected from their ethics counterparts. The study proposes a set of universal individual values and an ethical strategi...

A discussion paper about whether ethics education is necessary and its effect on society.

What is utilitarian theory in human rights?

What is ethical according to the utilitarian?

Does utilitarianism violate human rights?

What is the utilitarian point of view?