THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY AND THE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SCENE
Currently there is considerable debate about the kind and character of morality that will govern international business.those of the home country or those of the host country?should multinational corporations make business investments in countries where civil and political rights are violated? Is for corpora s in developed nations to move plants to developing nations that lack environmental, safety, and other operational standards? How do corporations develop and maintain global integrity? How do mu nationals produce codes of corporate conduct that will read consistently in dozens of languages? One view of the international situation claims that no culture's ethics are better than any others. This view is generally known as cultural relativism but is also referred to as ethical or moral relativism or cultural particularism. We have discussed relativism in Chapter 5. Relativism, you will recall, is the view that there are many standards of morality-not just one. Hence, morality is culturally conditioned and varies from culture to culture in response to unique circumstances An opposite point of view is ethical or moral absolutism- also referred to as cultural universalism. Cultural universalists, following the Western enlightenment tradition, ta the position that basic truths about the nature of right and wrong actions can be defined objectively. Absolutists believe that moral principles apply to all people independently place or circumstances and many of these ethical concepts are already universally articulated internationally accepted documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Furthermore, it is argued that ethics, properly understood, is a domain unto itself and is therefore independent of particular religious or cultural beliefs.
Among the most clear-cut ethical principles are the following: that it is ethically wrong to cheat, deceive, exploit, abuse, harm, or steal from others, that we have an ethical responsibility to respect the rights of others, including their freedom and well-being, to help those most in need of help, to seek common good and not merely our own self-interest and egocentric pleasures, and to strive to make the world more just and humane.