Seven Steps to Ethical Decision Making: Ethics as Central to Commerce

Ethics is an important part of business. While we sometimes feel like ethics gets in our way of "doing business" it is essential to our commercial activity. As soon as ethics declines you will find markets begin to decline after that. 

Let us consider for a moment corrupt versus economies that have less corruption. Economies that have a large shadow market and regularly default on their obligations are less robust than companies that follow codes of ethics. 

Why is that the case? It is because our economic system is based in human exchange and that requires trust. We would still be hitting each other over the head with clubs to get what we want versus trusting that a dollar has value, fulfilling written/implied contracts, and there are mechanism to enforce trust. 

The larger the economy, the more important a general sense of trust. That means ethics is central to conducting business and if we do not enforce ethics then we run the risk of damaging the entire system.

You can gain more information from Ethics.org

Seven Steps to Ethical Decision Making– Step 1: Define the problem
– Step 2: Seek out relevant assistance, guidance and support
– Step 3: Identify alternatives
– Step 4: Evaluate the alternatives 
– Step 5: Make the decision
– Step 6: Implement the decision
– Step 7: Evaluate the decision