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The Two Traditional Issues Involved with Ethics

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by

Muhammad Ahmad
in
  1. Ethical relativism (ER) – Universal values that apply to everyone or is everything relative to individual, country, company, etc. (Donaldson and Werhane 1979).
    1. Relates to cultural relativism. This presumes that different people reason about morality varies by culture, education, and religious traditions.
    2. Arguments for ER are as follows:
      1. Empirical evidence of cultural relativism.
      2. There is no viable universal standard that can be applied to everyone.
    3. Arguments against ER are as follows:
      1. Just because finding universals is hard, that does not imply that ER is correct.
      2. Just because a particular issues is not resolved does not imply that it is, in principle, not ever resolvable.
      3. Taking ER to its full extent means that you can’t justify any moral judgments at all.
    4. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977) attempted to legislate that what we say is moral is how we should behave. This Act was driven by the issue that you are being inconsistent with yourself if you say something is immoral yet do it anyway just because you are in a foreign country.
  2. Truth telling – Can you ever justify not telling the truth? Must we communicate honestly?
    1. A vigorous defender of truth telling is Kant. Truth telling is an essential feature of right communication (Lectures on Ethics). His reasoning is as follows:
      1. We all want others to follow this when speaking to us.
      2. All societies depend on mutual bonds of honesty and truthfulness to enforce their continued existence.
      3. Lying thwarts the discovery of new truths. Knowledge growth is required for the advancement of a society.
    2. Counter agreements to this are as follows:
      1. Everyone understands the game of inflating claims (not lying) in advertising etc. so it is all right.
      2. You can’t ever know the perfect truth around a product/service because perfect information is not available – people can’t know if a company is lying or bluffing.
      3. Outside of the advertising arena: How do you conduct a business negotiation if you never “put something on the table” that gives you room to wiggle so to speak?

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