When speaking of the impact of ethics on decision-making, it is hard to pin point a subject to speak on. Ethics is tightly intertwined with decision-making in business today. Objectivity, impartiality, integrity, honesty, and ethical principles above private gain – These are high ideals to which to aspire, and a challenge to maintain. Ethics or morality poses questions about how we ought to act and how we should live. Everything we do, or don’t do, is a choice that can affect the course of our lives and the lives of others. Such ethics rest on universal values that cut across time, culture, politics, religion and ethnicity. With all that at stake, it’s clear that the impact of ethics on decision-making carries deep rooted and heavy effects.

What is Ethics?

Let’s start by identifying what ethics is. Ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics also refers to the study and development of one’s ethical standards. It is necessary to constantly examine one’s standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.

Making Ethical Decisions

Many decisions managers make require them to consider who may be affected in terms of the result as well as the means. There are many tools for decision making, but few guides to indicate when situations might have an ethical implication. Yet this awareness is a crucial first step before decisions should be made. Recognizing the moral context of a situation must precede any attempt to resolve it. Otherwise, what’s to resolve?

Every choice or decision made as a manager can involve, to one degree or another, ethics or ethical implications. As a manager, one must be aware of the often times, subtle influences of ethics in decision-making. Yet, our own beliefs, cultural background, upbringing, religious heritage and other things constantly influence us to look through our own filter during the decision-making process, sometimes blinding us to ethical implications not known. If every individual were to conduct themselves and make decisions with ethics in mind, not everyone would make the same decisions or conduct themselves in the same way. Why? It is because everyone looks through their own filter during those processes, making for different outcomes.

It is very important however, that we try to conduct ourselves and make ethical decisions in everyday life and in business. In business, decisions that carry ethical impacts can help or hurt a company greatly. For example, deciding to help the ecology by recycling hazardous waste material might not carry much weight for a small company, but for a large organization with tens of thousands of employees and locations all over the world, this decision could greatly impact world ecology and how the public views the company.

Conclusion

Ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong. Everything we do, or don’t do, is a choice that can affect the course of our lives and the lives of others. Many decisions managers make require them to consider who may be affected in terms of the result as well as the means. Every individual is influenced personally by many things in their life, creating for them a filter in which to look through when making decisions. One’s filter can sometimes blind them to ethical implications during decision-making. Ethics can influence our decisions in many ways.