Applying Ethics in Practice
Applying Ethics in Practice
We will begin applying the ethics we are studying with via the discussion boards. I will be assigning case studies that have to do with the first 3 provisions of the Code of Ethics for Nursing for Week 9 presentations. For this week’s discussion, read the following article:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/03/us/charles-manson-hospitalized/index.html?sr=fbCNN010417charles-manson-hospitalized/index.html0300AMStoryLink&linkId=32991209 Applying Ethics in Practice
Presume you are the nurse admitting this patient. Discuss your reactions and your conflicts.
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Choose one of the first 3 provisions and discuss this article in that context. Please include the provision number in your post subject line. Initial post is to identify the provision and use it to support how you would solve the dilemma in the case study.
As the 1990s overtake us, public interest in ethics is at a historic high. While the press calls attention to blatant derelictions on Wall Street, in the defense industry, and in the Pentagon, and to questionable activities in the White House, in the attorney general’s office, and in Congress, observers wonder whether our society is sicker than usual. Probably not. The standards applied to corporate behavior have risen over time, and that has raised the average rectitude of businesspersons and politicians both. It has been a long time since we could say with Mark Twain that we have the best Senate money can buy or agree with muckrakers like Upton Sinclair that our large companies are the fiefdoms of robber barons. But illegal and unethical behavior persists, even as efforts to expose it often succeed in making its rewards short-lived. Applying Ethics in Practice
Why is business ethics a problem that snares not just a few mature criminals or crooks in the making but a host of apparently good people who lead exemplary private lives while concealing information about dangerous products or systematically falsifying costs? My observation suggests that the problem of corporate ethics has three aspects: the development of the executive as a moral person; the influence of the corporation as a moral environment; and the actions needed to map a high road to economic and ethical performance—and to mount guardrails to keep corporate wayfarers on track.• • • Applying Ethics in Practice
Sometimes it is said wrongdoing in business is an individual failure: a person of the proper moral fiber, properly brought up, simply would not cheat. Because of poor selection, a few bad apples are bound to appear in any big barrel. But these corporate misfits can subsequently be scooped out. Chief executive officers, we used to think, have a right to rely on the character of individual employees without being distracted from business objectives. Moral character is shaped by family, church, and education long before an individual joins a company to make a living.
In an ideal world, we might end here. In the real world, moral development is an unsolved problem at home, at school, at church—and at work. Two-career families, television, and the virtual disappearance of the dinner table as a forum for discussing moral issues have clearly outmoded instruction in basic principles at Mother’s knee—if that fabled tutorial was ever as effective as folklore would have it. We cannot expect our battered school systems to take over the moral role of the family. Even religion is less help than it once might have been when membership in a distinct community promoted—or coerced—conventional moral behavior. Society’s increasing secularization, the profusion of sects, the conservative church’s divergence from new lifestyles, pervasive distrust of the religious right—all these mean that we cannot depend on uniform religious instruction to armor business recruits against temptation.
Nor does higher education take up the slack, even in disciplines in which moral indoctrination once flourished. Great literature can be a self-evident source of ethical instruction, for it informs the mind and heart together about the complexities of moral choice. Emotionally engaged with fictional or historic characters who must choose between death and dishonor, integrity and personal advancement, power and responsibility, self and others, we expand our own moral imaginations as well. Yet professors of literature rarely offer guidance in ethical interpretation, preferring instead to stress technical, aesthetic, or historical analysis. Applying Ethics in Practice
Moral philosophy, which is the proper academic home for ethical instruction, is even more remote, with few professors choosing to teach applied ethics. When you add to that the discipline’s studied disengagement from the world of practical affairs, it is not surprising that most students (or managers) find little in the subject to attract them.
What does attract students—in large numbers—is economics, with its theory of human behavior that relates all motivation to personal pleasure, satisfaction, and self-interest. And since self-interest is more easily served than not by muscling aside the self-interest of others, the Darwinian implications of conventional economic theory are essentially immoral. Competition produces and requires the will to win. Careerism focuses attention on advantage. Immature individuals of all ages are prey to the moral flabbiness that William James said attends exclusive service to the bitch goddess Success.
Spurred in part by recent notorious examples of such flabbiness, many business schools are making determined efforts to reintroduce ethics in elective and required courses. But even if these efforts were further along than they are, boards of directors and senior managers would be unwise to assume that recruits could enter the corporate environment without need for additional education. The role of any school is to prepare its graduates for a lifetime of learning from experience that will go better and faster than it would have done without formal education. No matter how much colleges and business schools expand their investment in moral instruction, most education in business ethics (as in all other aspects of business acumen) will occur in the organizations in which people spend their lives. • • •
Making ethical decisions is easy when the facts are clear and the choices black and white. But it is a different story when the situation is clouded by ambiguity, incomplete information, multiple points of view, and conflicting responsibilities. In such situations—which managers experience all the time—ethical decisions depend on both the decision-making process itself and on the experience, intelligence, and integrity of the decision maker.
Responsible moral judgment cannot be transferred to decision makers ready-made. Developing it in business turns out to be partly an administrative process involving: recognition of a decision’s ethical implications; discussion to expose different points of view; and testing the tentative decision’s adequacy in balancing self-interest and consideration of others, its import for future policy, and its consonance with the company’s traditional values. But after all this, if a clear consensus has not emerged, then the executive in charge must decide, drawing on his or her intuition and conviction. This being so, the caliber of the decision maker is decisive—especially when an immediate decision must arise from instinct rather than from discussion.
This existential resolution requires the would-be moral individual to be the final authority in a situation where conflicting ethical principles are joined. It does not rule out prior consultation with others or recognition that, in a hierarchical organization, you might be overruled. Applying Ethics in Practice
Ethical decisions therefore require of individuals three qualities that can be identified and developed. The first is competence to recognize ethical issues and to think through the consequences of alternative resolutions. The second is self-confidence to seek out different points of view and then to decide what is right at a given time and place, in a particular set of relationships and circumstances. The third is what William James called tough-mindedness, which in management is the willingness to make decisions when all that needs to be known cannot be known and when the questions that press for answers have no established and incontrovertible solutions.
Unfortunately, moral individuals in the modern corporation are too often on their own. But these individuals cannot be expected to remain autonomous, no matter how well endowed they are, without positive organized support. The stubborn persistence of ethical problems obscures the simplicity of the solution—once the leaders of a company decide to do something about their ethical standards. Ethical dereliction, sleaziness, or inertia is not merely an individual failure but a management problem as well.
When they first come to work, individuals whose moral judgment may ultimately determine their company’s ethical character enter a community whose values will influence their own. Applying Ethics in Practice The economic function of the corporation is necessarily one of those values. But if it is the only value, ethical inquiry cannot flourish. If management believes that the invisible hand of the market adequately moderates the injury done by the pursuit of self-interest, ethical policy can be dismissed as irrelevant. And if what people see (while they are hearing about maximizing shareholder wealth) are managers dedicated to their own survival and compensation, they will naturally be more concerned about rewards than about fairness.
For the individual, the impact of the need to succeed is doubtless more direct than the influence of neoclassical economic theory. But just as the corporation itself is saddled with the need to establish competitive advantage over time (after reinvestment of what could otherwise be the immediate profit by which the financial community and many shareholders judge its performance), aspiring managers will also be influenced by the way they are judged. A highly moral and humane chief executive can preside over an amoral organization because the incentive system focuses attention on short-term quantifiable results.
Under pressures to get ahead, the individual (of whose native integrity we are hopeful) is tempted to pursue advancement at the expense of others, to cut corners, to seek to win at all cost, to make things seem better than they are—to take advantage, in sum, of a myopic evaluation of performance. People will do what they are rewarded for doing. The quantifiable results of managerial activity are always much more visible than the quality and future consequences of the means by which they are attained.
By contrast, when the corporation is defined as a socioeconomic institution with responsibilities to other constituencies (employees, customers, and communities, for example), policy can be established to regulate the single-minded pursuit of maximum immediate profit. Applying Ethics in Practice The leaders of such a company speak of social responsibility, promulgate ethical policy, and make their personal values available for emulation by their juniors. They are respectful of neoclassical economic theory, but find it only partially useful as a management guide.
As the corporation grows beyond its leader’s daily direct influence, the ethical consequences of size and geographical deployment come into play. Control and enforcement of all policy becomes more difficult, but this is especially true with regard to policy established for corporate ethics. Layers of responsibility bring communication problems. The possibility of penalty engenders a lack of candor. Distance from headquarters complicates the evaluation of performance, driving it to numbers. When operations are dispersed among different cultures and countries in which corruption assumes exotic guises, a consensus about moral values is hard to achieve and maintain Applying Ethics in Practice.
