Ethical and Unethical Business Practices

This paper will go over several ethical and unethical business practices. I will define both ethical and unethical followed by examples. There are numerous definitions of ethics. The definition usually depends on the context of the situation. For example, there are medical ethics and business ethics among many, many others. In general, business ethics is when employers conform to the approved standards of their profession. And unethical business practices is the opposite, not conforming to approved standards. Unfortunately, being unethical does not always mean that it is illegal.

Ethics has many different definitions and means many different things to different people. Ethics in general, is a type of moral philosophy. Ethics should be defined by the context in which it is used (i.e. business, medical). Logically, since we are dealing with businesses we will define ethics within the context of business practices. Business ethics is the application if ethical values to business behavior. Basically, what society believes is right and wrong and is applied to businesses. The generally accepted accounting principals (GAAP) "provides assurance to outsiders (external decision makers) that the information available in a given decision situation was prepared in accordance with a well-defined set of rules and guidelines" (Werner, & Jones, (2004) (1)16. Notice the phrase given decision situation. It means that the person who made the decision was following guidelines and rules. GAAP permits a certain degree of managerial discretion. Therefore, we rely on the people within this classification to be ethical.