The Nature and Ground of Management Ethics

Today, organizational requirements have inevitable effects on our individual and social life and behavior, and thereby, they will serve as grounds for many of our free actions and acquired characteristics. In such a situation, it is very likely that moral responsibility for such actions and characteristics is to a large extent on the shoulders of organizations and social institutes, rather than individuals and groups. Organizations and social institutes are morally responsible in virtue of their legal personality, and the obligation of pursuing and ensuring the fulfilment of the requirements of such responsibility is on these organizations and institutes. Thus, the notion of “management ethics” comes to be formed—a notion I revisit in this paper first with a descriptive-analytic method and a new viewpoint, and I will then reply to objections that might be levelled at the necessity of an ethics for management given practical features of moral problems of management, and then I consider and analyze various versions of the necessity of morality for managers in the literature of applied ethics in this area by adopting an Islamic approach. As a result of this analysis, I have sought to modify functionalist and purely utilitarian ideas to arrive at an authentic unqualified view of the necessity of an ethics for management.