Here is a list of frequently asked questions you get at leadership training workshops focusing on ethics. Having come along to a few of these to help out, I'm always struck that the same questions keep coming up time and time again.
1. Why should people consider the needs of others when they have nothing to do with the organization?
2. What's the ethical dimension to issues like private-public partnerships, developing markets, environment, natural resources and stem-cell research?
3. What's the relationship between the law, morality and ethics?
4. What right do others have to define what's ethical for me? If they have the right, what's that based on?
5. What about "human nature"? Are people innately good or innately bad? What behaviors are universally condemned? Are there behaviors that are condemned by some, but that are regarded as acceptable elsewhere?
6. How would you define "human rights"? Or "Free Will"? Or Universal Truth?
While ethics courses are important, we should stress antifraud training for the accounting profession over ethics.
An ethics course will not change a criminal to a law abiding citizen.
However, additional antifraud training for the accounting profession will prevent more fraud and help catch more crooks.
Respectfully,
Sam E. Antar (former Crazy Eddie CFO & convicted felon)
Why should people consider the needs of others when they have nothing to do with the organization?