Is it business ethics or just the golden rule? If you start early, and instill a good sense of ethical conduct within your employees, or as an employee cultivate these ethics within yourself, then you can be assured of working in a company that will not fall prey to deceptive practices and fraudulent processes.
Business ethics should be distinguished from the philosophy of business, the branch of philosophy that deals with the philosophical, political, and ethical underpinnings of business and economics. However, it is imperative that the small business owner not make the same mistake that larger organizations often do; the ethical policies that a business develops must not be in conflict with the organizational goals.
I have been the president and CEO of one publicly owned company and also was president of another that was responsible to customers who traded equities. There are professional ethics, which includes a system of moral norms of human behavior, belonging to a particular social group.
Businesses that participate in this type of unethical abuse of power and exploitation of children and women should be boycotted and shut down. Business ethics is primarily a negotiation with partners; ethics recordkeeping; use ethical methods of competition.
In other words, if a university ethics professor is attempting to model ethical behavior through his or her lessons, students will sort through the information and determine which ethical characteristics (if any) they will adopt. In our free enterprise system, a company that cannot manage its assets properly, has a product or service that the public wants to buy, and makes a profit for its shareholders goes out of business.