While sitting in my Business 101 class just the other day, I was busy writing down notes when the topic of ethics and morals came up. I was still focused on the fact that, being an 8:00am class, we had already had more people talk in class in the first fifteen minutes than in the entire last class period. She asked us to discuss why it was important to have morals and ethics for a business.
As a class, we talked about the importance of being credible and keeping and attracting new customers. But what does being ethical have to do with yourself? At my University, one of their missions is create purposeful, competent, and ethical human beings. But what does that exactly mean and how does it apply to us? Ethical, as defined by Merriam-Webster, deals with following accepted rules of behavior; what is morally right and wrong. In life, there are many times in which we are going to be faced with choosing right from wrong, even in the simplest times.
We have to make decisions every day that this comes into play. Is it right of me to doodle in class? It helps me concentrate, but it might be distracting to my teacher or classmates. My business teacher broke the topic down further by coming up with three questions to ask ourselves when we are facing these ethical dilemmas.
- Is it legal?
- Is it balanced?
- How will it make me feel about myself?
The actions that we make define who we will be and they can have consequences, if not thought through. Our teacher then asked for a student volunteer. One of the boys in my class stood up and walked to the front of the class, where he was given a plate and a tube of toothpaste. She asked him to draw a simple arrow on the plate. Once this was done, she instructed him to put the toothpaste back in the tube, without using anything else other than the plate and tube. He tried his best, with input from a classmate suggesting he squeeze the tube, in the hopes it would suck it back in.
The point of the activity was to show how our words flow freely and easily, but once said, they cannot be taken back. The “arrow” (our words) can hit the target, but sometimes not always have the outcome we hoped for. Moreover, the arrow might still be stuck in someone, but they’ve learned to work around it. The idea is that our actions and words that we say matter and we need to be aware of what we are doing and saying. So, before you need to make a choice, take a step back and assess your situation and possible outcomes by asking yourself these three questions or a version of your own. As Plato stated, “good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.”
