Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk about How to Do It Right, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 2

DECIDING WHAT'S RIGHT: A PRESCRIPTIVE APPROACH

ETHICS AND THE INDIVIDUAL

This chapter begins the part of the book that focuses on ethical decision making as something that individuals do. Many if not most ethical decisions in business organizations are made by individuals like you. In later chapters, we will address how the organizational context and the broader business environment also affect individual ethical decision making.

There are two ways to think about individual ethical decision making—the prescriptive approach and the descriptive approach. This chapter covers the prescriptive approach. It is derived from ethical theories in philosophy and offers decision-making tools (ways of thinking about ethical choices) that help you decide what decision you should make as a “conscientious moral agent” who thinks carefully about ethical choices¹ and who wants to make the ethically “right” decision. Our assumption is that your intentions are good and that your goal is to do the right thing. So, in this chapter we introduce ethical decision-making tools that can help you do just that, and we'll explain how you can integrate them and use them in a practical way.

We know, however, that people don't always make the best decision. Prescriptions aren't always followed. So it's helpful to understand how people's minds work—how people really make decisions. The descriptive approach, discussed in Chapter 3, relies on psychological research to describe how people actually make ...