BUSINESS ETHIC AND VALUE : APPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND VALUES IN BUSINESS AND ECONOMY

APPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND VALUES IN BUSINESS AND ECONOMY
OVERVIEW
-Business Function of Creating Wealth
-Ethics and the Quest for Excellence
-Synergizing Moral and Economic Activities

Business Function of Creating Wealth
-Efficiency, profits, prosperity, and growth are among the values that highly characterize business organizations
-Economic values are the essence in any business
-Businesses are also expected to provide employment opportunities, products and services to the society, which will strengthen the society's well being and improve their lifestyles
-To ensure prolonged viability, corporations have to play their role as corporate citizens, who not only refrain from harming others in the process of conducting business but also promotes the social and cultural realm of the community in which they operate.

Ethics And The Quest For Excellence
-Excellence is being superb or a state of being in the finest or the best condition for achieving the purpose, whatever it may be.
-Human beings are excellent when they are able to live according to their core purpose and values. (Aristotle)
-This striving for excellence or the journey towards the final state of excellence require inculcating intellectual as well as moral virtues.
-Several virtues such as honesty, loyalty, altruism and justice are important values in shaping human personality and development
-True success can only be achieved if we live according to noble values by practicing virtues that strengthen character and leadership
-An individual is not considered successful if he or she did something immoral while completing a task even if the end result of the task is good.
-It is considered wrong to benefit oneself at whatever cost to others even though businesses stress self-interest.
-An example of unlawful conduct on the part of companies is selling dangerous products or fraudulently misrepresenting the quality of products.
-Social responsibility of businesses is presently understood as attitudes and values that promote the long term interest of the company as well as the environment in which it operates.
-A socially responsible corporation may be willing to incur high short run costs and losses for the sake of the long term viability and prosperity of the corporation.

Synergizing Moral And Economic Activities
The basic roles of organizations in the economic systems are:
-Producing goods and services efficiently and effectively according to society's preferences and needs, and
-Distributing the goods and services to members of the society according to distribution criteria. This is where issues of justice are prominent, especially distributive justice.
-In producing and distributing products and services, economic institutions interact directly with both the public and the government.
-The economic institutions are responsible to determine what will be produced, who will carry out production work, how work is organized, what the scarce resources are, and how the end products will be distributed among members of the society.
-The subjective preference theory of value is an economic paradigm that looks at consumers as the dynamic or key variable in determining how market capitalism works.
-Those with highly demanded talents get high incomes and those with strong purchasing power 'decide' what will be produced through preferences expressed on the demand side of the market supply and demand curve.
-Distributive justice refers to fair distribution of society's benefits and burdens. The key word is "equal". In distributive justice, equality means treating anything that is equal, equally and the unequal is treated unequally.
-In today's highly competitive economy, economic institutions are expected to not merely focus on making profits only. They are expected to be fair, aware of their responsibilities and contribute actively to the public good.
-Understanding the concepts of social and distributive justice will help businesses fulfill their social responsibilities ethically.