An ethical person is concerned with what is the right thing to do. Ethical values should be applied to all decisions that are made. This can be a challenge as there are often many forces of influence involved, ambiguous circumstances or details, and different stakeholder groups with different takes on morality. Companies often develop a set of universal values similar to a mission statement to address ethical questions. This "values statement" would be above and beyond a company's policies and procedures. For example, the Ethics Resource Center (1996) was asked, "to develop and integrate a practical ethics program into the daily ope

In the case of the shuttle disaster in 1986 an important life changing ethical decision of whether to launch based on doubt regarding an O-ring design faced many biases and forces of influence. Choices and compromises had to be made based on government pressure to launch, time pressures from NASA and the reputation of the company manufacturing the O-rings. The manufacturers management gambled on their design holding up under launch stresses despite concern from its engineers. There was no ethical commitment by the managers here. They caved under pressure. McCall and Kaplan (1990 p5) are relatively easy on these managers stating, "the explanation lies much deeper and involves well-meaning managers caught up in events, victims of systems they created or simply found themselves in." An ethical commitment must transcend all outside pressures including social, economic and political. This requires a steadfast set of principles. Could these managers ethically defend this decision today? I doubt it.

Ethics in decision-making is part of our everyday lives. It is far too prevalent in today's headline news and universities and business schools are scrambling to upgrade their curriculum to include some ethics requirements. Several articles state, "it may be better to integrate ethics into other classes, so students see it as an integral part of other subjects they are studying, such as finance, accounting or marketing." One such article is in the Houston Chronicle (2002) and another clear across the globe in the national Thailand newspaper. Ethics is in the forefront of everyone's mind and hopefully, this will spur change and a more ethically aware society.

Ethical questions are raised to each and every one of us, most every day in both our personal and professional lives. Professionally, we may or may not be in a position where we are required to make huge impacting ethical decisions. Take for example the recent news event of Jap

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Approximate Word count = 1307
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)