The ethics of the company becomes everyone's business

The ethics of the company becomes everyone's business. For several years, new practices have been developed: ethical charters, programmes of sustainable development, agencies rating, ethical labels, tracking... On the capital plan, share the SMEs of wealth with employees of the company gradually settled in the most This evolution, identified as "business ethics" (business ethics), including led to advances in the fields of environment and the collective ethics. Note in passing that the companies most prone to bail on environmental and ethical issues have been the first to have invested on these matters to an axis of communication to their customers! In the end, this "collective" ethics participated in the development of an "ethical concern" in the consumer society, despite or because the juridico-financial scandals that have hit those who trumpeted their business ethics.

However, there is a rise of evil being and stress in the workplace diseases that seem to indicate that the community still has long way to go to each of its members individually benefits from the collective ethics. It is in this context the reflection on the role of individual ethics in the business. It is in its infancy but it bet on growth in the coming years. Universities, such as HEC Montreal, showed the way through a practical study on the role of ethics in management. The real issue is to design the company as a field of practice preferred ethics and social well-being without to disavow its vocation for wealth creation or the principle of free competition. The first experiments to demonstrate that it is possible to develop fair trade companies or have ethical funds whose financial profitability is not less than the average of the financial returns of the market. As a symposium organized in 2004 at Sciences Po by the Fondation Ostad Elahi in collaboration with the Chair of sustainable development had already shown, the development of the ethical concern is therefore an issue of society and its impregnation of the collective consciousness can be done only progressively.

The role of entrepreneurs is major in this process, and their sensitivity to the decisive ethical to create a real "ethical ecology of labour relations". The challenge posed by the development of individual ethics of managers through education of the thought to the ethical criteria for the work. However, it is all of the employees of the company which will have to be aware of ethical behavior to shape an ethical conscience of the company. If the right to work is already carrying an ethical vision by the choice of the rights that are defined and protected by the legal standard, the question of ethics goes beyond the scope of the legal because it is the expression of the humanization of society: "it is the heart of the history of the men that we are, a history oriented towards the completion of the reports which are the fact of the coexistence and the need for recognition of a shared world" and shareable. ()

Understand that such act is ethical or not requires that a system of values used for reference. Pragmatism and experimentation of the individual today compensate the lack of standards. The question is whether it is conceivable to find a universal frame of reference to ethical behaviour in business. On the merits, it is ethical to individual: the individuals live and grow are the players that give rise to an ethic of business by their intentions, choices and actions on a daily basis. Ethics is therefore before any case of men and women of goodwill who will advance the idea and the practice of ethics in the work before that structures not to seize to erect it in standard accepted by the greatest number.