Ethical Behavior of a Person or a Essay

Ethical behavior of a person or a corporation greatly affects the stakeholders with which that person is involved. Often, people and companies take serious consideration when it comes to those stakeholders, and they work to take good care of the people who are involved with them (Keller, 2002). There have been cases, though, where ethical behavior has been ignored in the name of profit. Eventually, most companies and people who ignore their ethics are caught and punished, but not before they end up harming the financial and emotional lives of many of their stakeholders. Plato once said that the nature and the origin of justice was that men who were capable of doing wrong to other people would often do so. He also said that men who did not have enough strength to keep themselves from being harmed by others would not do harm to other people.

In other words, if you give a person enough strength and power and opportunity he will, generally, use it to harm others. People do things because they are able to get away with those things. If they see that it is too risky or they do not feel strong enough, they will avoid doing something that might harm others - because it could cause too much harm to themselves. They will only take calculated risks, and if they feel as though what they will get is worth the small chance of being caught, they will go ahead and perform the activity. In a leadership capacity or other position of power this can be extremely problematic, because many people abuse power (Anderson, 1999). This occurred with the Enron scandal, and it also occurred with Bernard Madoff and his ponzi scheme.When a leader (or anyone else, actually) enters a decision-making process, ethics become one of the most important issues for that leader - and for his followers and stakeholders (Keller, 2002). Some of the decision-making that people go through is very simplistic and easy, and some of it is much more complex. That is to be expected, but that is no reason why the ethical standards should change. Where many people get into trouble is through being ethical in one area of life and not in others. Sometimes, these people also focus on being very ethical in small things, but they may do large things that are not at all ethical in any way. The reverse may be true as well, and they may feel that doing large things ethically makes up for all of the small things with which they get away.

Even the best liars often get caught eventually, though, and that is true for unethical business decisions just as much as it is true for unethical personal decisions. Generally, the larger the lie a person tells, the more of a problem it will be when that lie is discovered (Anderson, 1999). Bernie Madoff was a great example of that. He lied to his investors and told them that he had their money. He didn't have the money, of course. When his deceit was discovered, the majority of his clients lost all that they had. Many of them saw their life savings disappear in the blink of an eye, and in some cases that was….....