Issues To Consider When Implementing A Corporate Code Of Ethics

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their
actions.
During the dawn of the new public awareness of social
responsibility economist Milton Freidman (1997) argued that corporations
cannot have social responsibility because they are not real, they are
intangible and emotionless. Only human beings are able to have social
responsibility (pp. 781-787). Corporate executives of corporations may
have individual social values that they feel are important to social
responsibility, but according to Freidman, they must not let these values
interfere with their primary responsibility for which they were hired. In
Freidman’s opinion, the primary responsibility of executives is to maximize
corporate profit benefitting owners and stockholders. Social
responsibility is a role the government must maintain, not the company.
Friedman’s reasoning is that a company will have to increase the cost of
its product or service to justify the cost of being ethical. This cost,
which is more or less a tax, is passed on to the consumer. It ...

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789-795).
It can also cost a company a lot of money by not being ethical.
Another example is a coal mining shaft that collapsed on coal miners in
West Virginia. Operations were temporarily halted when gas was detected in
the mine but resumed two days later even though gas was still present. The
mine owner, gambling with fate, decided that the gas levels weren’t
dangerous enough to keep the mine closed any longer. He risked an
explosion instead of risking a coal order. An explosion occurred, killing
three workers and enclosing eight underneath the rubble for twenty days.
In this case, the ethical decision to place more value on human life was
too expensive for the coal mine ...

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