Business today has to take a broad view of ethical issues, not in terms of letting certain actions slide as was done in the past, but in terms of seeing more and more of its choices as ethical dilemmas with pitfalls for the company as well as for society. We live today in a litigious society and to a degree in a more judgmental one, and ethical lapses are closely followed by a public that is both eager to hear details of every error in judgment and unwilling to look the other way when it believes an individual or a company has done something unethical. Race and sex discrimination in their various forms are clearly ethical issues for business, issues which impact on society and which are viewed as fundamental issues of right and wrong. Society at large no longer takes the attitude that such discrimination is acceptable. Indeed, an examination of what Americans have always believed about themselves says they never were acceptable in a country founded on principles of equality and tolerance, but in truth for most of our history sex and race discrimination have been part and parcel of the American experience. Over the last two decades, though, Americans have fought hard to change this and to forge a new sense of fairness that businesses would do well to heed. Many might like to believe that this is a battle already won, but even a cursory examination of the newspapers for a week or two shows that sex and race discrimination remain important problems in our society.
The term "ethical" itself is open to some argument as to precisely what is and is not ethical, for there are different notions of what is right and what is wrong. There are, however, certain principles such as honesty and doing no harm to others which are held by most people in Western society. This fact makes it possible to see the unethical as those things that are dishonest or that do cause harm (Toffler, 1986, 10-11).
The problem of racism is not specificall...