Alahmad and Murphy on Business Ethics

The first two journal articles that were compared and contrasted were Ala Alahmad’s 2010 article on To Be Ethical or Not to Be: An International Code of Ethics for Leadership and Patrick Murphy’s 2009 article on The Relevance of Responsibility to Ethical Business Decisions. Some key findings of Alahmad’s writings were that ethics and leadership were closely tied together; they were found to be derivatives of one another. He mentioned that ethics is an individual thought process of making good or poor decisions. Alahmad described an international code of leadership that was heavily veiled with great moral fibers. Some notable characters of his code included honesty, respect, punctuality, humbleness, and great dignity. However, in reading his work it was hard to depict any original thoughts on ethics. He gathered quotes and principles from other researchers to form the body of his work. Finally, he mentioned that he did not conduct an extensive review of the literary works at best his writings should be used as subjective information only.

Murphy wrote about responsibility being at the atomic structure level as it relates to ethics. Murphy did an examination on some 2008 articles that were presented at a Notre Dame Ethical Dimension of Research Conference and how the responsibility was the crux of all the articles. In fact, where Alahmad writings tended to be leadership centric, Murphy’s writings were responsibility centric. He consolidated many types of responsibilities into six categories. They were legal, corporate, managerial, social, consumer, and societal. It was determined that legal responsibility was the foundational principle of business ethics. Murphy described the articles and proved how responsibility was ...

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...the old articles, verses the new one can conclude that we have not evolved enough in the business ethics domain.

Works Cited

Alahmad, A. (2010). To be ethical or not to be: An international code of ethics for leadership. Journal of Diversity Management, 5(1), 31-35. doi:2009231431

Drucker, P. (1981). What is business ethics?. Public Interest, 63, 18-36. Retrieved from http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20080708_1981632whatisbusinessethicspeterfdru cker.pdf

Friedman, M. (1970). The social responsibility of business to increase its profits. New York Times, 32, 33, 122-124, 126. Retrieved from http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp- business.html

Murphy, P. (2009). The relevance of responsibility to ethical business decisions. Journal of Business Ethics: Supplement, 90, 245-252. doi:2051417411