Business Ethics in Practice

03

Ethical Decision-Making

learning outcomes

When you have completed this chapter you will be able to:

• understand and critically evaluate Kohlberg’s and Erikson’s descriptive theories of ethics

• critically evaluate the idea of a descriptive theory of ethics

• understand and critically evaluate the organisational context of ethical practice

• understand and apply approaches to ethical decision-making

• understand what mature ethical thinking involves.

introduction

This chapter aims to examine how we ‘do’ ethics. First, it looks at descriptive theories of ethics. Unlike normative theories of ethics, these are not concerned with philosophical reflection on the meaning of ethics but rather with how we make our decisions and what we need in order to make ...