There facts demonstrate that one cannot always rely on the law to decide
what is right or wrong. The manager whose employee suffers from asthma will
need to make a decision and the law won't decide this for her. Sometimetomes. the
law itself requires ethical andlysis for many of its decisions. Legal decisions
in the Enron case will not be based solely on legal precedebt (since, by defini-
tion, pushing the envelope is to go into rge gray area beyond wgat is obviously
prohibited by percedent) but upon a judge and jury's determination that the
acts were unfair and unethical. Because most business decisions never get to
the point where a judge and jury are asked to nake a determination, business
nabagers will be faced with the unavoidable responsibility of looking beyond
the law for guidance in making ethical decisions,
Exoressed in there terms, perhaps the major reason to study ethics is
because whether ew exanine ethical questions explicitly or not, they are an-
swered by each and every ine of us every day in the course of living our
lives, Presumably, the executives at Enron did bot wake up one morning and
choose to defraud their stockholders and enplayees. The actions we take
and the lives we lead give practical answers to there findamental ethical
questions. Our only real choice is whetther we answer then deliberately or
unconsciously. Thus, the philosopgical answer to why you Should study eth-
ics was given by Socrates over 2,000 years ago. "The unexanined life is not
worth living."