Professional Ethics (part 2)

Need for Ethics


-Ethical behaviour is necessary for a society to function in an orderly manner
-The need for ethics in society is sufficiently important that many commonly held ethical values are incorporated into laws.
e.g what will happen if we couldn't depend on the people who deal with to be honest.If everybody all  consistently lied,it would be almost impossible for effective communication to occur.

Why people act unethically?

2 reasons:

1.The person's ethical standards are different from those of society as a whole e.g drug dealers,bank robber etc.

2.The person chooses to act selfishly.

Ethical dilemmas is a situation a person faces in which a decision must be made about the appropriate behaviour
e.g -sell defective products,cheat price,falsify tax returns,cheat on exams etc.

Simple approach to resoving ethical dilemmas:
1)Obtain the relevant facts
2)Identify the ethical issues from the facts
3)Determine who is affected by the out come of the dilemma and how each person/group is effected.
4)Identify the alternative available to the person who must resolve the dilemma
5)Identify the likely consequence of each alternative
6)Decide the appropriate action.