Event! Virtual Team Challenge
Week Two: Ethics
Student Handout
Ethics are the inner-guiding moral principles, values, and beliefs that people use to analyze or interpret a situation in order to decide on the “right” or appropriate way to behave.
Some Key Terms from class:
What is Ethics?
Consider this: Again, you find yourself as a fisherman living in prehistoric society. You decide you should travel to the nearest loincloth maker several villages away from your in order to trade some of your fish for a loincloth. You have been trading with the loincloth maker for a long time and are excited about the deal he will give you.
When you arrive at his tent, you overhear him bragging to a friend that he doesn’t actually make the loincloths he trades, but steals them from a neighboring village. Over the years, you have become friendly with the loincloth maker and he is your only supplier, since the neighboring village he steals them from is hostile to your tribe. What should you do? Ignore what you have heard and continue to deal with him? Turn him in to the tribal chief, even though it means losing your source and an old friend? This is an ethical dilemma.
As humans started to organize into bigger and bigger communities, they needed ways to ensure that people treated each other a certain way. They needed a way to let everyone know what “right” and “wrong” were in any number of situations. They formed ways to ensure that people in society treated each other in a way everyone agreed was acceptable.
First, societies came up with norms. They were informal codes of conduct that dictated how people in society should treat each other. This included manners and everyday behavior, as well as mores, which were norms considered essential to the functioning of everyday society – such as the codes against murder or theft. Many of these mores were codified into laws. The first written law appeared around 3800 years ago, in what is present day Iraq. This marks the starting point of the evolution of human society.
But sometimes laws aren’t enough. For example, what if you have the opportunity to do something you know is wrong, but it's not against the law?
The solution to this is a set of guidelines and standards that tell people how to behave or act in certain situations. These guidelines and standards that about one’s “place of living” later came to be called by “ethics” by some ancient Greeks theorists, who wrote about these ideas about 2500 years ago.
Have you ever been faced with an ethical dilemma? What did you do? Did you wish you knew what to do? When we realize how other people are affected by our decisions, ethical problems crop up. Here are some handy rules for making ethical decisions.
Tip for Success: When making decisions, the interests of everyone affected must be taken into account. To help you make ethical decisions and behave in ways that benefit everyone affected, four rules may be employed. Remember, you will not pay a price for making ethical decisions. You will pay a price for not making them.
Steps to Success: There are four simple rules of thumb a decision-maker may follow when facing an ethical dilemma:
1) The Utilitarian Rule. The utilitarian rule states that an ethical decision should produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Consider which decisions will benefit or harm different people. Then, choose an action that produces the greatest benefit, or reduces the most harm, to the all of the people affected by the decision.
2) The Moral Rights Rule. The moral rights rule states that an ethical decision should maintain and protect the fundamental rights and privileges of all people affected by your decision. Compare and contrast different courses of action on the basis of how the rights of the people affected are involved. Choose the decision that best maintains and protects the rights of all the people affected by the decision.
3) The Justice Rule. The justice rule states that the ethical decision is the one that distributes benefits and harms as equally, fairly, or impartially as possible to all those affected by the decision. Compare and contrast different courses of action on the basis of the degree to which they will result in a fair or equitable distribution of outcomes to everyone affected by the decision. Then, allocate the outcomes as impartially and equally as possible.
4) The Practical Rule. The practical rule states that the ethical decision is the one you have no reluctance telling everyone that you made. Ask yourself; does your decision fall within accepted values or standards? Would I be willing to communicate the decision to all those affected by the decision, or to the world, through television or the Internet? Would the people around me – my friends, family, and schoolmates – approve of my decision?
Why Do the Right Thing?
Do you think ethics are important? As stated before, you will not pay a price for making ethical decisions. You will pay a price for not making them.
Consider what would happen in a world without ethical principles. Everyone would act in his or her own self-interest.
Consider our prehistoric society. What if you tried to maximize the amount of fish you caught without regard to the environment? What if all the fisherman came and over-fished the area, until the other sea creatures had nothing to eat, and all died? The pursuit of individual goals has resulted in disaster for everyone, as the resource depended on for fish has no been destroyed.
Consider the world today. What would it be like if everyone cheated, and expected each other to cheat? Everyone would expect to be cheated by everyone else, so everyone would cheat.
In business, New City and in life, your reputation for integrity is your most valuable asset. Perhaps the most important benefit of behaving ethically is the lift to your self-esteem and to your reputation gained by behaving ethically and “doing the right thing.”
Ethics in New City
You will face ethical issues in the business simulation that are similar to ones you might encounter in real business. In Event!, you can be assured that if you follow the Ethical Rules of Thumb, you will always make the right decision when faced with an ethical dilemma. It is crucial that you remember these guidelines and make your decisions in New City – and in life -- accordingly.