Part 1: The Relationship of Legal and Ethical Duties
1 Why should I care about this course?
This course should help your business comply with the law, behave ethically, and build relationships that lead to long-term success. These reasons also organize the sections which structure this text.
- First, we will examine models that relate law and ethics. This will help you understand how ethical duties often become legal duties, how ethical duties expand on legal duties, and when these overlap (or not!).
- Second, we will review much material about the law itself. If you violate legal duties, someone will probably sue you or you’ll go to jail. If you value your assets, or your freedom, this material is worth covering. One important legal duty we will examine is the duty many businesses have to make money for others.
- Third, we will cover material on ethics. If you behave ethically, it is also less likely that someone will sue you or you’ll go to jail. It is also more likely that you’ll be the kind of employee / employer / partner with whom others will want to do business. Plus, people that live by an ethical code are probably happier than those that do not, perhaps because those that do not are being sued or trying to escape from prison.
- Fourth, we will cover material on stakeholders: those who are affected by the things your business does. Considering legal and ethical duties to stakeholders, as well as how those stakeholders affect your business, can be important to helping your business be profitable in the long-term.
- Fifth, we will examine a special category of stakeholder: employees. As most people will either be an employee or an employer at some point in their lives, understanding legal duties owed to employees will help with the goal of avoiding liability. Understanding theory developed to understand employees as stakeholders will help with long-term business success.
- Sixth, we will examine duties to the environment, both from a legal and ethical perspective. As the environment affects the happiness of you and others in a deep way, and is a heavily regulated area of business, this chapter matters.
- Seventh, we will cover business and society from a perspective of strategy. Can applying stakeholder theory help with long-term profit maximization? Can philanthropy be strategic? We will then conclude the text by discussing the role of stakeholder or consumer responsibility.
Exercises
- We will start off easy: name a favorite company, and why. This should be a company that has information publicly available, because we will return to it in the exercises throughout the course.
