Business Ethic: How Human Actions Can Be Judged As Right Or Wrong

Ethics
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Introduction
Ethics is a division of philosophy that fundamentally seeks to establish and understand how human actions can be judged as right or wrong. When making decisions where ethics are involved, ethical theories provide a foundation for which people seek guidance from. In ethical decision making, people do not make a decision in the exact same way since the information and decision rules differ from person to person and from place to place. For that reason, ethical theories provide different points for a different decision-making approach or a decision rule such as predicting the end result and adhering to one's obligations and duties to others in order to attain what the person thinks is the ethically correct decision. Justice, least harm, respect for autonomy and beneficence are some the general set of targets that decision makers strive to attain in order to be successful.
The ethical theory which stipulates that people ought to stick to their obligations and duties when engaging in decision making where ethics are involved is the deontology. Here, it is perceived that upholding one’s duty is ethically right and therefore an individual will follow their obligations to society or other individuals. People who use this school of thought tend to make consistent decisions in view of the fact that their decisions are based on the people’s set duties. On the other hand, utilitarian ethical theories are based on one's aptitude to foresee the consequences of an act. Utilitarians believe that an ethically correct alternative is that that yields the most benefit to the most people. Utilitarianism is divided into two: act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism follows the description of utilitarianism where an individual performs actions that benefit the most people in spite of own stance or community constraints such as laws while rule utilitarianism considers the law and is concerned with justice. A rule utilitarian target to benefit the most people but via just and fair means (Graham, 2004).
An ethical trap consists of two ethical decisions, a primary ethical decision, and a secondary ethical decision. A secondary ethical decision arises when an individual makes a poor primary ethical decision (Cottone & Claus, 2000). This secondary ethical dilemma is intrinsically more difficult to resolve since the secondary decision needs to be resolved while the primary decision needs to be justified. Most people can’t escape once they are...