Business ethics is also called corporate ethics, which is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment (Business Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Plato. Stanford.edu. 2008-04-16). In my opinion, business ethics can be regarded as a system formed in people’s mind, which has a standard of morality. In other words, people will judge a businessman from not only his achievements in work, but also the ways and process during the period he reached his goal.

After reading the six pages in the chapter “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits” of the book “Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance”, I get some ideas about business ethics. According to the content, I understand and agree with the author’s opinion, which demonstrates that it is a kind of social responsibility for the bosses of firms to benefit every shareholders as much as possible by respecting different culture in different regions and countries. Also, to keep a market stability, businessmen have to do everything legally, if not, the crime of fraud or deception would take away all assets they owned. What’s more, a good manager will take good care of stockholders, customers, and employees, all of them will be benefited from every trades.

Talking about a business ethics news story last year, I would like to talk about the cyber-attacks. Last year, some companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Apple have voluntarily gone public with their security troubles. However, there are still some companies like Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, and some others that do not want to be transparent to the costumers. In fact, the behavior of different companies will affect customers feeling a lot because they are facing the wall of trust. That can be regarded as a type of business ethic, people have their own criteria to determine how good a company is, and if they choose to follow the company, they must believe in it. This is a good business ethics news story, as I think.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ethics#cite_note-1

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10187339&page=171

http://www.scu.edu/r/ethics-center/ethicsblog/business-ethics-news/18689/Top-Business-Ethics-Stories-of-2013

http://www.scu.edu/r/ethics-center/ethicsblog/business-ethics-news/15517/CYBER-ATTACKS:-Should-Companies-Admit-They%27ve-Been-Hacked