Ethical Business Practice

Ethical business practice is concerned with the obligations and responsibilities of business in society to uphold moral norms and to live up to the expectations of stakeholders, publics, governmental entities, and society. Those standards include norms of fairness and honesty, understandings of right and wrong, and expectations of responsiveness and accountability. The ethical standards that businesses must live up to exist in both formalized agreements, such as taxes and payments to employees, and the implicit understandings that define the business’s role within society.

In the 20th century, a commonly accepted myth was that the business of business was just to do business, or make a profit—in other words, that business was amoral or outside of ethics. That is no longer the case in the 21st century. ...