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- Developing ethics codes and
Functions or purposes served by codes
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Discipline . This function gets all the attention. Most codes are set forth to establish clearly and forcefully an organization's standards, especially its minimum standards of acceptable conduct. Having established the limits, organizations can then punish those who exceed them.
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Educate . This can range from disseminating standards to enlightening members. Company A's employees learned that anything over $100 was a bribe and should not be accepted. But engineers learn that their fundamental responsibility is to hold paramount public safety, health, and welfare. Codes certainly teach minimum standards of conduct, but they can help a community to articulate and understand their highest shared values and aspirations.
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Inspire . Codes can set forth ideals in a way that inspires a community's members to strive for excellence. They can be written to set forth the aspirations and value commitments that express a community's ideals. They can point a community toward moral excellence.
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Stimulate Dialogue . Engineering professional codes of ethics have changed greatly over the last 150 years. This has been brought about by a vigorous internal debate stimulated by these very codes. Members debate controversial claims and work to refine more basic statements. Johnson and Johnson credits their credo for their proactive and successful response to the Tylenol crisis. Regularly, employees "challenge the credo" by bringing up difficult cases and testing how effectively the credo guides decision-making and problem-solving. The CIAPR's Disciplinary Tribunal cases have served as a focus for discussions on how to interpret key provisions of the organization's code of ethics. The NSPE Board of Ethical Review decisions have also provided an excellent forum for clarifying ethical concepts (public safety, conflict of interest) in the context of cases brought to the board by NSPE members. The BER discusses cases in terms of relevant provisions of the NSPE code. Over the years, the NSPE BER has established a firm foundation for the resolution of difficult ethical cases by developing analogies with cases it has already discussed and clarified.
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Empower and Protect . Codes empower and protect those who are committed to doing the right thing. If an employer orders an employee to do something that violates that employee's ethical or professional standards, the code provides a basis for saying, "
No! ". Engineers have refused to carry out directives that place in jeopardy the health and safety of the public based on statements like canon 1 of the CIAPR code. (The NSPE code has similar provisions.) Because codes establish and disseminate moral standards, they can provide the structure to convert personal opinion into reasoned professional judgment. To reiterate, they provide support to those who would do the right thing, even under when there is considerable pressure to do the opposite.
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Codes capture or express a community's identity . They provide the occasion to identify, foster commitment, and disseminate the values with which an organization wants to be identified publicly. These values enter into an organization's core beliefs and commitments forming an identify-conferring system. By studying the values embedded in a company's code of ethics, observing the values actually displayed in the company's conduct, and looking for inconsistencies, the observer can gain insight into the core commitments of that company. Codes express values that, in turn, reveal a company's core commitments, or (in the case of a hypocritical organization) those values that have fallen to the wayside as the company has turned to other value pursuits.
Source:
OpenStax, Corporate governance. OpenStax CNX. Aug 20, 2007 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col10396/1.10
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