Ethics

7 Pages 1824 Words

for the organisation as a whole. When acting within a certain environment, be it local, national or global, the organisation must be seen to be 'socially acceptable'. I believe this idea of control of the organisation's self-interest together with maintaining a good standing in the public eye to be the main factor for preparing these ethical codes. Both of these can only be achieved through clearly defined codes of ethics from which individuals' roles can conform through a manner of standardisation. However, through the enforcement of ethical codes, people revoke to a basic level of thinking, judgement and acting as identified in Lawrence Kohlberg's pre-conventional level. When put simply, it allows little room for individual thought or expression, only rewarding good actions and punishing those that are bad. Can it be right to control tasks that involve ethical reasoning by individuals? This is certainly much different than, say, controlling how someone operates a particular machine. Conversely, the autonomy paradigm, present in some organisations' ethical policies, is put in place to promote individual critique through their moral thought and judgement. It emphasises a feeling of a 'moral community', seen before in Kant's work, and from which Kohlberg developed his post-conventional level, that allows people to apply their own reasoning to daily situation...