Ethics and Your Life
Ethics and Your Life
Ethics and Your Life
Ethics and Your Life
A little longer than just lately, society has seen an increase in business ethics that long for a proper definition of what ethics should be. From Enron to Bernie Madoff, millions of people have lost their retirement because someone decided to get a little more than greedy.
Let break down ethics. If we were to look in Webster's dictionary, we'd find that ethics are: the study of standards of conduct and moral judgment; the system of morals of a particular person, religion, group etc. Ethical, would be: conforming to professional standards of conduct.
Everyone who does business with a person or company would like to know that they're being treated ethically, fairly. Could you say the same thing about morals? Everyone should be treated the same on a moral basis? Something doesn't sound right here. Are ethics and morals the same thing? It would appear so, but in reality, they're not.
Ethics is, and always will be, a personal thing, completely about the self. One can be a member of a church and still not have the same ethics as his/her brethren. Though, in a church or any large group, morals would be the guiding light (pun intended).
Because we have different cultures throughout the world and people are reared in many different ways, there are different ethics levels. In America, we expect to have the right to walk the streets without being killed and then eaten. This same frame of mind is not necessarily frowned upon in somewhere like the Amazon jungle. There was a time in the Amazon that a person from the "outside" was the main course at the village gathering. Ethics determined that survival was the rule of the land. Well, today, morals are our rules of the land. Ethics need to and will always remain a personal standard.
Governments have written legal moral codes to lay out the expectations of people in its society. If one breaks a moral law, they're subject to the fine or imprisonment. Unfortunately, Governments will never be able to enforce a person's ethics. For this reason, there will always be thieves that look you in the face, smile as they pat you on the back and, all the while, clean out your safe/portfolio.
So how do we protect ourselves from un-ethical deviants when it seems that they're everywhere, kind of like cockroaches? People may not like to hear the answer I'm about to give, but it came through a hard earned lesson; never give anyone, company or person, your life. In other words, truth is, you will never know anyone's ethical boundaries. If you trust someone with everything you have, well, there's a reason for the saying, "never put all your eggs in one basket." The same is true for anything that deals with any part of one's livelihood; health, finances, career and, unfortunately, relationships. I know, the last one, relationships, is the one you're supposed to be able to trust 100%, yet with a divorce rate over 50% in the U.S., are you living in fantasy land or in reality of the possibilities?
Always have questions ready for people you're about to hand over your hard earned life too. If you are using a Financial Advisor and they tell you that everyone in the market has lost and everything will come back, should you trust them? Really, who are they? How do they know the market will come back? I know Financial Advisors that didn't lose one penny of client's money during this whole recession debacle. It's not because of ethics that some advisors lost a client's money, but the lying that followed it, well, that's another article.
I could probably drop name after name of companies that contributed to the recent recession and the fallout of the housing market, but the common denominator between each and every one of them was greed mixed with a total lack of personal ethics.
Ethics in business will always be a concern for society. The best any company will ever do, will be to continuously train their employees to adhere tightly to company guidelines regarding group morals. There are many ways for leading executives to keep their employees on the straight and narrow, but who is watching the executives?
Big corporations on Wall Street are not the only culprits when it comes to the problem of ethics. Construction companies take shortcuts, mechanics sell un-necessary auto repairs, Police departments fill ticket quotas. Though there are usually systems set in place to deal with construction or questionable law enforcement entities, yet there still are not enough checks and balances to go around.
Every company, large, medium or small needs to have a serious system in place to check the personal ethics of its employees. In-house internal affairs is always a suggestion, but really, setting up a weekly or monthly checks and balance system regarding the education of ethics and how it affects everyone's life; whether at home, in public or in the work place, should be carefully implemented.
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