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Ethical Principles of Business

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ETHICAL PRINCIPLES IN BUSINESS
3.1 Ethics
Ethics has been defined as concerned with the development of moral standards by which actions, situations and behaviour can be judged. (Boyd et al)
Oelgeschlager. et al gave the simplest definition of ethics as standards conduct. Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society. It asks how these standards apply to our lives and whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable, that is, whether they are supported by good reasons or poor ones.
Therefore, a person starts to do ethics when he or she takes the moral standards absorbed from the family, church and friends and asks: “What do these standards imply for the situations in which I find myself? Do these standards really make sense? What are the reasons for or against these standards? Why should I continue to believe in them? What can be said in their favour and what can be said against them? Are they really reasonable for me to hold? Are their implications in this or that particular situation reasonable?”

Ethics is the study of moral standards, the process of examining the moral standards of a person or society to determine whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable in order to apply them to concrete situations and issues. The ultimate aim of ethics is to develop a body of moral standards that we feel are reasonable to hold standards that we have thought about carefully and have decided are justified standards for us to accept and apply to the choices that fill our lives.

Ethics is not the only way to study morality. The social sciences such as anthropology, sociology and psychology also study morality, but do so in a way that is quite different from the approach to morality that is characteristic of ethics. Although ethics is a normative study the social sciences engage in a descriptive study of ethics.

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