It's important to make it clear to students that though ethical views seem to vary across time and place, ethics is not merely relative. The view that values are relative to culture is known as cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is a descriptive view - it describes how attitudes about values differ across cultures.
In advocating cultural relativism, students are recognizing the importance of social factors in determining beliefs about how things should be, and are also recognizing how social factors may vary from place to place, and over time. This perspective is useful for respecting the beliefs of cultures that are different from the ones with which we are familiar. Normative or ethical relativism is a different sort of view, one that holds what is valuable, good or right is determined by society.
It is not merely describing variability in beliefs about value, but suggesting how values are to be understood. Often normative relativists suggest that what is ethical is determined by the majority in a society. They believe that the degree of America's goodness is defined by the extent to which majorities are able to have their way.
Such people are bound to believe that it is the job of the judicial branch of government to facilitate this by adopting a modest, deferential stance regarding what legislatures do. Many also implicitly believe that such an attitude should shape the attitude of courts toward what executive branch officials and agencies do. Here, judicial deference is said to be dictated by the plebiscitary nature of the modern presidency. Many have argued that, because presidents alone are elected by a national constituency, they are unique embodiments of the national will, and hence should enjoy the maximum feasible untrammeled latitude to translate that will into policies.
So, we must ask: How aberrant, or how frequent, are abusive majorities? A related but different question is: When legislatures, which are majoritarian bodies, act, how often are they actually acting on behalf of majorities?
My belief, based on almost half a century observing Washington, the beating heart of American governance, is that as government becomes bigger and more hyperactive, as the regulatory, administrative state becomes more promiscuously intrusive in the dynamics of society and the lives of individuals, only a steadily shrinking portion of what the government does is even remotely responsive to the will of a majority.
So, paradoxically, as government becomes bigger, its actions become smaller; as it becomes more grandiose in its pretensions, its preoccupations become more minute. Ali Bokhari emigrated from Pakistan in , settled in Nashville, became a taxi driver, and got a very American idea: He started a business to serve an unmet need.
He bought a black Lincoln sedan and began offering cut-rate rides to and from the airport, around downtown, and in neighborhoods not well served by taxis. After one year he had 12 cars. Soon he had 20, and 15 independent contractors with their own cars. And he had a website and lots of customers. Unfortunately, he also had some powerful enemies. The cartel of taxi companies had not been able to raise their rates since Bokhari came to town.
Those companies, in collaboration with limo companies that resented Bokhari's competition, got the city government's regulators to require him to raise his prices and to impose many crippling regulations.
She had little education and no resources, besides her talent for making lovely flower arrangements, which a local grocery store hired her to do. It threatened to close the store in order to punish it for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows tried but failed to get a license, which required her to take a written test and to make four arrangements in four hours. The adequacy of the arrangements was judged by licensed florists who were acting as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors.
Meadows, denied re-entry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty. But the people of Louisiana were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers. Elsewhere in Louisiana, the monks of St. Joseph Abbey also attracted government's disapproving squint. In , Hurricane Katrina damaged the trees that for many years the monks had harvested to finance their religious life.
Seeking a new source of revenue, they decided to make and market the kind of simple wooden caskets in which the Abbey has long buried its dead.
But the monks were unwittingly about to embark on a career in crime. Its supposed purpose when created in was to combat diseases. It has, however, long since succumbed to what is called "regulatory capture. At the time the monks began making and selling caskets, nine of the board's 10 members were funeral directors, one of whose principal sources of income is selling caskets.
In the s, Louisiana had made it a crime to sell "funeral merchandise" without a funeral director's license. The monks would have had to earn 30 hours of college credits, and to apprentice one year at a licensed funeral home to acquire skills they had no intention of using.
And their abbey would have been required to become a "funeral establishment" with a parlor able to accommodate 30 mourners. And they would have had to install an embalming facility, even though they only wanted to make rectangular boxes, not handle cadavers.
In other words, the monks would have had to stop being monks. The law requiring all this rigmarole served no health or sanitary purpose: Louisiana does not stipulate casket standards, or even require that burials be done in caskets. Obviously, the law that was brought to bear against the monks is an instrument of unadulterated rent-seeking by the funeral directors to protect their casket-selling cartel.
Rent-seeking occurs when private interests bend public power to their advantage in order to confer favors on themselves, often by imposing impediments on actual or potential competitors.
Now, you may be thinking that I have wandered far from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Abraham Lincoln, and the work of a political commentator. But the question raised by these examples of abject rent-seeking is a question about the proper limits of the power granted to majoritarian institutions.
The government action used to prevent a Pakistani immigrant from entering into his chosen profession of operating a transportation company, and the government action that blocked an aspiring flower arranger from exercising her skill and consigned her to die in poverty, and the government action that blocked the monks from supporting themselves by making and selling wooden boxes were violations of a basic right.
All three actions, and thousands like them from coast to coast, should be, but usually are not, considered unconstitutional. They should be struck down as violations of a natural right, the right that Lincoln understood as the right to free labor, the right that was, of course, at the core of the slavery crisis.
It is the unenumerated, but surely implied, constitutional right to economic liberty. But laws abridging that right survive and proliferate because courts at least since the New Deal have stopped doing their duty to defend this economic liberty against its rent-seeking enemies. In a sense, the problem began in Louisiana 16 years before the monks' monastery was founded in It began across Lake Pontchartrain from the monastery, in New Orleans.
That city had awarded some rent-seeking butchers a lucrative benefit. The city had created a cartel for them by requiring that all slaughtering be done in their slaughter houses. Some excluded butchers went all the way to the U. Supreme Court to challenge this law. They lost when, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court, in a decision, upheld the law that created the cartel.
In doing so, the Court effectively expunged a clause from the 14th Amendment. The clause says: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. It construed that phrase so narrowly, in fact, that the phrase essentially disappeared from constitutional law.
A melancholy fate for a phrase that was intended as shorthand for the full panoply of rights of national citizenship. Intermittently since then, and steadily since the New Deal, courts have abandoned the protection of economic rights, including the fundamental right to earn a living without arbitrary and irrational government hindrances.
Instead, courts have adopted the extremely permissive "rational basis" test for judging whether government actions are permissible. Without that awareness, it can be difficult to justify a decision on ethical or moral grounds in a way that others would find persuasive.
If you value equal rights for all and you go to work for an organization that treats its managers much better than it does its workers, you may form the attitude that the company is an unfair place to work; consequently, you may not produce well or may even leave the company.
It is likely that if the company had a more egalitarian policy, your attitude and behaviors would have been more positive. Ethical decisions involve judgments of facts and situations that are subject to interpretation and other influences. Analyze the gray areas of ethical expectations within the context of corporate decision making and ethical business practice.
Law and ethics are not the same thing. Both exist to influence behavior, but complying with the law is mandatory, while adhering to an ethical code is voluntary. Laws define what is permissible, while ethics speak to what is right, good, and just. Lawyers and judges are responsible for clarifying the meaning of a law when there is ambiguity or when a matter is subject to interpretation. Where ethics are concerned, that responsibility lies with each individual. In organizations, employees can look to the code of ethics or the statement of values for guidance about how to handle ethical gray areas.
Even when an individual has a clear sense of right and wrong, or good and bad, it can be difficult to know what is ethical in a given situation. One analyzes ethical issues by asking questions such as: What could happen?
How likely is it happen? What might the harm be? Who might be hurt? The answers are not always clear cut. Individual judgments can be influenced, even clouded, by a number of factors.
In addition, there are times when people believe that the ends justify the means. In other words, if the result of an action is good, then it is okay if the action itself is unethical. There is a saying that a good person is one who does good deeds when no one is looking. The same goes with ethical decisions.
People who are ethical follow their beliefs even when they believe no one will find out about what they have done. They had the opportunity to be ethical but chose not to be. How will employees working in that country handle that situation, especially if something that could be considered unethical in one place is actually thought to be important to business success in the other?
For instance, in some cultures it is customary for business partners and customers to be invited to weddings, with the expectation that guests will give a cash gift to the bride and groom. Adhering to ethical standards in such instances can be difficult.
This way to ethics : Ethical decisions are not always clear-cut. American companies are often criticized for the treatment of workers who produce their products in China. However, rules concerning the rights of workers are much more relaxed in China than in the United States. Does an American company have the right to order factory owners in China to change their way of doing business?
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Ethics in Business. Search for:. Ethics, an Overview. Learning Objectives Define ethics and how it applies to organizations. Key Takeaways Key Points Ethical behavior is based on written and unwritten codes of principles and values held in society.
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