Ethical Dilemmas at Work

Abstract

How are the ethical problems facing the individual at work any different from those to be faced anywhere else? Surely here, if nowhere else, the argument that business ethics is no more than ethics applied to business has some application. Certainly it is true that many of the difficult moral decisions faced in the workplace are raised by issues that are not peculiar to work but are to do with one’s treatment of other people and theirs of you. Must one keep this promise? Was that indeed a promise or merely a vague statement of intent? How far should should one go in taking decisions that affect others without consulting or, at least, informing them? And so on. But it is also true that an individual who works in or for an organisation is in a position which is complicated by factors that do not apply to a person acting in a private capacity.