Understand Ethics
What is Ethics?
Ethics can be defined broadly as a set of moral principles or values. Each of us has such a set of values, although we may or may not have considered them explicitly.
Philosophers, religious organizations, and other groups have defined ideal sets of moral principles or values in various ways.
Examples of prescribed sets of moral principles or values at the time of implementation level include laws and regulations, church doctrine, codes of business ethics for professional groups such as CPAs, and codes of conduct within individual organizations.
It is common for people to differ in their moral principles and values and the relative importance they attach to these principles. These differences reflect life experiences, successes, failures, and influences of parents, teachers, and friends.
Together, they combine to define how individuals choose to interact with one another. In philosophy, ethics defines what is good for the individual and society and establishes the nature of duties that people owe themselves and one another.
Origine of Word Ethics
The word “ethics” is derived from the Greek word “ethos” (character), and “morality,” another name for ethics, comes from the Latin word “mores” (customs).
The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning ‘character’ or ‘custom.’ Ethics is a branch of knowledge that tells us what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable, and what is rejectable. This sense is God-gifted, and naturally, people have such knowledge as a basic requirement. Moreover, people also have to acquire relevant knowledge regarding ethics.
Types of Ethics
The substantial literature on ethical norms in social science is initially of two main types: the codes of ethical and professional conduct for research issued by various social science organizations and the various commentaries on ethical issues, sometimes addressing social research in general and sometimes specific to particular social science areas (Punch, 1998: 281).
One dilemma was that in everyday social life, we (as researchers) tended not to be respectful of others’ academic efforts (Sieber, 1993: 14).
Arnau (1959: 40) stated that unethical research covered ‘the boundaries between permissible and impermissible, imitation, stylistic plagiarism, copy, replica, and forgery remain nebulous’. However, the major branches of ethics are depicted in the following figure:
Applied Ethics
‘Applied ethics’ discusses how moral outcomes can be achieved in specific situations. It is a discipline of philosophy that attempts to apply ethical theory to real-life situations.
This discipline has many specialized fields, such as bioethics, environmental ethics, and business ethics.
According to Brenda Almond, co-founder of the Society for Applied Philosophy, applied ethics is “the philosophical examination from a moral standpoint of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment.”
It describes attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various human life and society fields.
Porter (2006: 30) stated that an emerging typology for applied ethics uses six domains to help improve organizations and social issues at the national and global levels:
- Decision ethics, or ethical theories and ethical decision processes;
- Professional ethics, or ethics to improve professionalism;
- Clinical ethics, or ethics to improve our basic health needs;
- Business ethics, or individual-based morals to improve ethics in an organization;
- Organizational ethics, or ethics among organizations; and,
- Social ethics, or ethics among nations and as one global unit.
Business Ethics
Business ethics addresses questions such as the limits on managers in the pursuit of profit or the duty of whistleblowers to the general public as opposed to their employers. As such, it is a study that is supposed to involve practitioners as much as professional philosophers (Almond, 1996: 89).
Meta-ethics and Metaphysics
‘Meta-ethics’ explores the theoretical ground and reference of moral propositions and how their truth values may be determined; meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts. Both meta-ethics and metaphysics are closely associated with social science operational research.
For instance, moral intention and truth values, as well as moral facts (genuine and unbiased information used in research), are two strong positive attributes that are preconditions for validating legitimate research work in any phenomena of the social science realm.
Descriptive Ethics
‘Descriptive ethics’ refers to the moral values people actually abide by. It is an analytically moral obligation that indicates a strong value.
Descriptive ethics is a value-free approach to ethics, which defines it as a social science (specifically sociology) rather than humanity.
It examines ethics not from a top-down a priori perspective but rather observations of actual choices made by moral agents in practice. Some philosophers rely on descriptive ethics and choices made and unchallenged by a society or culture to derive categories, which typically vary by context.
This can lead to situational ethics and situated ethics.
Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, is the study of peoples’ beliefs about morality.
It contrasts with prescriptive or normative ethics, which study ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act, and with meta-ethics, which is the study of what ethical terms and theories actually refer to (Hossain, 2012: 58).
Moral Psychological Ethics
‘Moral psychological ethics’ delineates how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is. Moral psychology is a field of study that began, like most things, as an issue in philosophy and is now properly considered part of the discipline of psychology.
Some use the term ‘moral psychology’ relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development (Lapsley et al., 1996 and 2006).
Others tend to use the term more broadly to include any topics at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of mind (Doris and Stich, 2008: 86; Wallace, 2007). Such topics are ones that involve the mind and are relevant to moral issues.
Some of the main topics of the field are moral responsibility, development, and character (as related to virtue ethics), altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, and moral disagreement (Doris and Stich, 2008: 1). Wallace (2007: 6) writes, ‘moral psychology is the study of morality in its psychological dimensions.’
Normative Ethics
‘Normative ethics’ discusses the practical means of determining a moral course of action.
Traditionally, normative ethics (known as moral theory) was the study of what makes actions right and wrong. These theories offered an overarching moral principle one could appeal to in resolving difficult moral decisions.
The key target of social science research is to distinguish between right and wrong in any events of social phenomena, e.g., ‘what is the right behavioral attitude of a democratic authority in a state, and or, why a democratically elected government tends to wrong attempts to remain in power?
Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics is a type of natural ethics that aims to protect a balanced atmosphere for all natural beings. It is concerned with questions such as the duties of humans towards landscapes or species.
Bioethics
Bioethics is concerned with identifying the correct approach to matters such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research.
The following examples of questions illustrated in the table below might be considered in each field to illustrate the differences among the different types of ethics:
Illustration of Questions in Various Ethical Structures
| Meta-ethics | What does ‘right’ even mean? |
| Normative (prescriptive) ethics | How should people act? |
| Applied ethics | How do we take moral knowledge and put it into practice? |
| Moral ethics | What is the moral obligation in conducting social research? |
| Descriptive ethics | What do people think is right? |
Concept of Ethics and Its Importance in Quality Management
Ethics is defined from various angles by different scholars. The main theme in the concept is the same. It is the knowledge that tells people what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable, and what is rejectable. The criteria on which the ethics will be determined may differ.
Ethics are determined by the values of any person, of any organization, or of any community.
And the values are guided by the faith of those covered. Organizations that believe in serving the customers and society as a whole with better quality products must do ethical activities to achieve this for noble purposes. They must respect the customers’ faith in them.
They never produce products that are below their commitment standard. If they do so, that will be treated as unethical activities.
For any TQ organization, ethical conduct is very essential. Customers’ loyalty is very essential for a TQ organization for survival and improvement.
The ethical conduct of the organization and customers’ loyalty are integrated. If any organization fails to fulfill its commitment to the customer in any form, it will lose its customer loyalty. Once the organization loses it, it is very difficult to regain the lost one.
Need for Ethics
Ethics is the branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct concerning the rightness and wrongness of specific actions and the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such activities.
It includes a study of universal values such as the essential equality of all men and women, human or natural rights, obedience to the law of the land, concern for health and safety, and, increasingly, the natural environment.
Ethical behavior is necessary for a society to function in an orderly manner. It can be argued that ethics is the glue that holds a society together.
Let’s imagine, for example, what would happen if we couldn’t depend on the people we deal with, to be honest.
If parents, teachers, employers, siblings, co-workers, and friends all consistently lied, it would be almost impossible for effective communication to occur.
The need for ethics in society is sufficiently important that many commonly held ethical values are incorporated into laws.
However, many ethical values cannot be incorporated into laws because of the judgmental nature of certain values. That does not imply, however, that the principles are less important for an orderly society.
Ethical Dilemma
An ethical dilemma is a situation in which a decision must be made about the appropriate behavior.
A simple example of an ethical dilemma is finding a diamond ring, which necessitates deciding whether to attempt to find the owner or to keep it.
Resolving Ethical Dilemmas
In recent years, formal frameworks have been developed to help people resolve ethical dilemmas. Such a framework aims to identify the ethical issues and decide on an appropriate course of action using the person’s values.
The six-step approach that follows is intended to be a relatively simple approach to resolving ethical dilemmas:
- Obtain relevant facts.
- Identify the ethical issues from the facts.
- Determine who is affected by the outcome of the dilemma and how each person or group is affected.
- Identify the alternatives available to the person who must resolve the dilemma.
- Identify the likely consequence of each alternative.
- Decide the appropriate action.
General Ethics
An ethical dilemma arises wherein what is good for one party affected by choice is not good for another party affected by choice.
In such situations, individuals should ask two questions: “What good do I seek?” and “What is my obligation in this circumstance?”
General ethics attempts to address these questions by defining what is good for the individual and society and establishing the nature of obligations that individuals owe themselves and each other.
Framework for General Ethics
No universal set of standards or changing codes of ethics can point to the correct choice of behavior in all situations. Some have worked on developing frameworks for general ethical decision-making.
Following is one such six-step framework:
- Obtain the facts relevant to the decision.
- Identify the ethical issues from the facts.
- Determine who will be affected by the decision and how.
- Identify the decision maker’s alternatives.
- Identify the consequences of each alternative.
- Make an ethical choice.