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Every single business worth its salt in today's world has an ethical code that is part of the required reading for every employee. This ethical code might include actions that the employee is expected to abide by, actions that the executives and the company as a whole are unable to take due to ethical reasons, or it might include some combination of both of these elements.
There is also an unwritten ethical code that occurs between businesses that determines how transactions are completed and how money is made and distributed. However, this code is not enforced all the time, and for that reason, a disagreement has cropped up between people who believe that these codes should be enforced strictly and those who believe there should be “room to move” in all things.
The Strict Position
The position that is articulated by individuals who take the strict enforcement point of view is actually quite a simple position to grasp. Namely, since these ethical codes exist and are agreed to by many of the businesses that exist, there is no logical reason not to enforce these codes. To some people who would see shades of relativism in all things, strict enforcement supporters argue that relativism is a big problem and is creating the lack of enforcement of these businesses' ethical codes, and therefore, it is not an acceptable reason not to enforce ethical standards as strictly as they might otherwise be enforced.
Further to this position, is the idea that since ethical standards are in place to protect stock holders from embezzlement, the environment from pollution and a number of other people who might be tricked by a business, they have to be enforced extremely strictly in order for the ethical standards to have any meaning in the first place.
The Relative Position
In opposition to these arguments, is a group of people who take the position that while ethical codes do need to be enforced, there also needs to be a level of relativism involved in the enforcement in order to reflect the complexities of real life situations and dealings. A number of different things can occur in reality that according to these individuals were never accounted for by the executives who began to implement the ethical codes. This can result in situations where strict enforcement of ethical codes would cause a conflict with the spirit of the entire idea of ethical codes, and because of this problem of lack of foresight, there needs to be some “room to move” in the case of special circumstances.
In many ways, this view can be regarded as being a pragmatic one. Rather than looking at the world in absolutes as the people of the strict enforcement position do, debaters who uphold the relative position witness times when punishment might not actually be just. Therefore, in order to prevent the system from harming those that it seeks to protect, ethical codes need to be altered when they are found to be imperfect rather than be strictly enforced with no thought to whether the punishment actually fits the crime.
Business ethics are a big deal and ethical issues in the corporate world is an issue that has many people asking: “what is business ethics?” Business ethics cases can be difficult to understand and a definition for business ethics is perhaps even more difficult to come by. Business codes and ethics, because of the confusion, need to yield to further research regarding their true outcomes and consequences.
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