Personal Ethical Development

Personal Ethical Development

Given the almost collapse of the very foundation of the financial industry in the United States which then rapidly metastasized to a financial and economic crisis with global proportions, ethics and ethical behaviours in doing business and the lack of it was one of the major factors why the mortgage meltdown happened. Thus, it is even more necessary now that organizations focus on the personal ethical developments of all of its individual members. This paper aims to explore the developmental aspect of one's ethics including the importance of ethics and ethical systems.

It is interesting that the above observation was also made by Wong and Beckham (1992) almost two decades ago in doing a post mortem for the failure of several savings and loan financial institutions. Furthermore, Wong and Beckham (1992) identified two ethical theories that can guide the development of one's ethics: 1) utilitarianism and 2) Ross's prima facie dutie.

In the development of one's ethical persona, it is possible that ethical decisions will be based on whether the proposed action, which is morally right, leads to the greatest ratio of benefits compared to costs. In other words, the action should result to the highest utility to all people affected by the decision. On the other hand, personal ethics development primarily based on the utility model could result to ethical decisions that are moral, but didn't account for "justice and other principles that society embraces" (Wong & Beckham, 1992, p. 175). In other words, the ethical character of an individual is at best should be developed from both the utilitarian model and the principles that society follows.

According to Rae (2000), an ethical system can be clas...

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Works Cited

Fear, J. & O'Brien, J. (2009). Where does the buck stop? Community attitudes to over-lending and over-spending. Australasian Accounting Business & Finance Journal, 3 (1), 3-12.

Josephson Institute (2010). The Six Pillars of Character. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from http://josephsoninstitute.org/sixpillars.html.

Rae, S. (2000). Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics. Washington: Zondervan.

Tetrault Sirsly, C. (2009). 75 years of lessons learned: chief executive officer values and corporate social responsibility. Journal of Management History, 15 (1), p. 78.

Trevi�o, L. & Nelson, K. (2007). Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How to Do It Right (4th ed). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Wong, Al. & Beckham, E. (1992). An Applied Ethical Analysis System in Business. Journal of Business Ethics, 11 (3), 173-178.