What is Ethical Judgment?
After the scandals of companies such as Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco International, ethics in business has become one of the most important issues facing American businesses and a main focus of the media. To embed ethics in our decision making process, it is very important to understand what ethics is. The last decades have witnessed a growing interest in explaining ethical and unethical behaviors in both scholars and practitioners perspectives. Many scholars and practitioners have sought to answer the following questions. What is ethical or unethical? Why ethical judgments are different?
According to Hunt and Vitell (1986), ethical judgment is the process of considering several alternatives and choosing the most ethical alternative. For Rest (1986), ethical judgment is the process by which an individual determines that one alternative is morally right and another alternative is morally wrong. Respectively known as Hunt–Vitell model and Rest’s four-component model, these definitions are two of the most cited in the literature of business ethics.
These two models are very similar. Normative ethical theories are classified into two categories: deontological and teleological theories (Murphy & Laczniak, 1981). Deontological theories focus on the decision maker’s specific behaviors or actions, while teleological theories focus on the consequences of these behaviors or actions (Chang, Chen, & Chen, 2008). Both the Hunt–Vitell model and Rest’s four-component model tie with both the deontological and teleological theories. The two models give an individual the opportunity to compare various alternatives and perceive the possible consequences of each alternative for various stakeholders. In both models, the decision maker has more than one option to choose from.
Although they are very similar, the two models also present some distinctions. The Hunt–Vitell model requires the decision maker to compare various alternatives, while the Rest’s four-component model allows the comparison of alternatives but does not require it. In the Hunt–Vitell model, the concept ‘ethic’ can be weighted. The decision maker is required to weight various alternatives and choose the most ethical. On the other hand, the Rest’s four-component model considers the concept ‘ethic’ as categorical construct. In this model, an action or behavior is either morally right (ethical) or morally wrong (unethical).
Sparks and Pan (2010) reviewed these two models and argued that the term ethical judgment needs a common definition. Based on the similarities and the differences of the two models, they defined ethical judgment as “an individual’s personal evaluation of the degree to which some behavior or course of action is ethical or unethical” (Sparks & Pan, 2010). This last definition allows the decision maker to determine to what extent a behavior is ethical or unethical.
References
Hunt, S. D., Vitell, S. M. (1986). A General theory of marketing ethics. Journal of Macromarketing 6(1), 5–15. doi:10.1177/027614678600600103.
Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral development: Advances in Research and Theory. New York, NY: Praeger.
Shang, R., Chen, Y., & Chen, P.. (2008). Ethical Decisions About Sharing Music Files in the P2P Environment. Journal of Business Ethics, 80(2), 349-365. doi:10.1007/s10551-007-9424-2
Sparks, J., & Pan, Y. (2010). Ethical judgments in business ethics research: Definition, and research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics, 91(3), 405-418. doi:10.1007/s10551-009-0092-2
Valentine, S. R., & Rittenburg, T. L. (2004). Spanish and American business professionals’ ethical evaluation in global situations. Journal of Business Ethics 51(l), 1–14. doi:10.1023/B:BUSI.0000032384.74020.a8.
Moussa Berete, moussaberete@yahoo.com
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