GB502 Week 2 Discussion 2

Unit 2: Lecture

Food for Thought

https://youtu.be/-jYmEzq3hLc

Corporate Looting: Sub-Saharan Africa Loses $100B A Year

Ethics symbolizes substantiated standards of right and wrong that recommend what humans should do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through problematic matters. At the heart of ethics is a fear about something or someone other than ourselves and our own needs and self-interest. Thus, ethics is concerned with other people's interests, with the interests of society, with God's interests, with "ultimate goods", and so on. So when people 'think ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves.

Ethics in the African context, is a humanitarian ethics; ethics that places a great deal of emphasis on human welfare; and a morality of duty requires each individual to demonstrate concern for interests of others. The ethical principles of compassion, solidarity, reciprocity, cooperation, interdependence, and social well-being, which are counted among the philosophies of the communitarian morality, primarily impose duties on the individual with respect to the community and its members. All these concerns uplift the notion of duties to a status comparable to that given to the notion of rights in Western ethics. African ethics does not give short-shrift to rights as such; yet, it does not give obsessional or narrow-minded emphasis on rights.

Conduct your own research to learn more about ethics and moral practices of doing business in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Reference

· Stark, A. (2014, August 01).  What's the Matter with Business Ethics?  Retrieved from https://hbr.org/1993/05/whats-the-matter-with-business-ethics