Approaches to Corporate Ethics and Bio-ethics

In business, and most other types of organizations, the job of maintaining the values of the company is not the responsibility of any one department or individual; everyone—officers and board, executives, managers, supervisors, and individual contributors—has a role in fostering ethical behavior.  Each is a role model to others and can encourage and motivate fellow employees to "do the right thing."

Corporate ethics is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.

The range and quantity of business ethical issues reflects the interaction of profit-maximizing behavior with non-economic concerns. Interest in business ethics accelerated dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, both within major corporations and within academia. For example, today most major corporations promote their commitment to non-economic values under headings such as ethics codes and social responsibility charters. 

Ethical issues include the rights and duties between a company and its employees, suppliers, customers and neighbors, its fiduciary (a legal or ethical relationship of trust between two or more parties. Typically, a fiduciary prudently takes care of money for another person.) responsibility to its shareholders. Issues concerning relations between different companies include hostile take-overs and industrial espionage. Related issues include corporate governance;corporate social entrepreneurship; political contributions.

Main tasks are:

• Governance: regulation, corporate governance committees, Sarbanes-Oxley, auditing, etc.
• Creating an Ethical Culture: strategic planning, human resources, organizational ethics, etc.
• Leadership: executive compensation, tone at the top, the role of the CEO in ethics, etc.
• Corporate Social Responsibility: sustainability, stakeholder theory, triple bottom line, etc.
• Workplace Issues: labor and employment practices, monitoring, work/life balance, etc.
• Product and Brand: consumer safety, reputation, intellectual property, and strategic marketing
• Corporate Wrongdoing: corruption, bribery, scandals, whistleblowing, etc.
• Professional Ethics: the behavior of managers and employees in matters such as loyalty, honesty, etc.
• Global Business Ethics: cross-cultural issues that arise in countries such as China and India.

Bioethics is the study of typically controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine. It is also moral discernment as it relates to medical policy, practice, and research. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, and philosophy. It also includes the study of the more commonplace questions of values ("the ethics of the ordinary") which arise in primary care and other branches of medicine.

The field of bioethics has addressed a broad swath of human inquiry, ranging from debates over the boundaries of life (e.g. abortion, euthanasia), surrogacy, the allocation of scarce health care resources (e.g. organ donation, health care rationing) to the right to refuse medical care for religious or cultural reasons. Bioethicists often disagree among themselves over the precise limits of their discipline, debating whether the field should concern itself with the ethical evaluation of all questions involving biology and medicine, or only a subset of these questions. Some bioethicists would narrow ethical evaluation only to the morality of medical treatments or technological innovations, and the timing of medical treatment of humans. Others would broaden the scope of ethical evaluation to include the morality of all actions that might help or harm organisms capable of feeling fear.

The scope of bioethics can expand with biotechnology, including cloning, gene therapy, life extension, human genetic engineering, astroethics and life in space, and manipulation of basic biology through altered DNA, XNA and proteins. These developments will affect future evolution, and may require new principles that address life at its core, such as biotic ethics that values life itself at its basic biological processes and structures, and seeks their propagation.