Honesty In Ethics

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Ethical and Legal View Honesty Honesty is a virtue; hence it belongs to the virtue-based type of ethical theory as proposed by DesJardins in his book (DesJardins, 2014). Corporations in general and human beings in particular strive to adopt virtuous characteristics in their daily activities such as honesty because they seek to lead a good and meaningful life. From ethical perspective, most people will say being honest is a good way to live your life; people take great pride when associated with having integrity or being honest. Nobody likes to be called untrustworthy (Crampton & Dees, 1993). In the corporate world, business also seeks to be portrayed as an honest corporation. People usually seek and prefer to do business with honest or trustworthy …show more content…

There are two moral values that are conflicting each other in the case of whistle-blowing, fairness and loyalty. By the numerous of researches carried out, it can be concluded that people who value fairness highly is more inclined to become whistle-blower whereas people who value loyalty more than fairness tends to be hesitant (Waytz, Dungan, & Young, 2013). A potential whistle-blower is someone who possesses solid personality traits which based on courage and integrity to help him/her with ethical decision making. He/she should be brave enough to stand the ground in coping with the pressures from higher ranks to keep silent (Mintz, 2014). A whistleblower must believe that it is his/her duty to report the illegal or unethical activities to responsible parties in order to serve justice or “fairness”. On the other hand, an individual may also choose not to blow the whistle for his/her inclination towards loyalty to his/her employer. This also can be argued as an ethical approach as loyalty also is part of virtues. In the end, if the good consequences outweigh the bad, an ethical person will choose to blow the whistle in an effort to serve the greater …show more content…

Negative impacts discussed here include unfair trade activities and lose of confidence between investors as a result of the leakage of sensitive-information. With the imposition of hard law preventing insider trading activities such as Capital Market & Services Act 2007 in Malaysia, it is hoped that the occurrence of such activity will be at a minimal level. Encouraging trends in adopting soft laws such as company’s policy and/or guidelines for trading activity should be welcomed with open arms in order to promote awareness of the seriousness of this