ABSTRACT
Managers are people who are paid to oversee the work of others.1 In this role, they often make decisions that impact other people. This book is intended to help managers reflect on the impacts of their decisions and to help them in making such decisions ethically. In this book, I broadly define a manager as anyone who is responsible for work done by others, whether that person is a supervisor of bank tellers or an executive vice president who is responsible for overseeing several vice presidents. The word “ethics” is often used loosely, and it is not hard to find discussions of medical ethics (cloning), business ethics (predatory lending), legal ethics (tort reform), professional ethics (accounting) and various other kinds of ethics. Actually, ethics has been recognized as a branch of philosophy for many centuries. The earliest writings on ethics that we still have available to us in the Western tradition of philosophy come from Plato and Aristotle, and are nearly 2,500 years old. Ethical issues have concerned thinkers and writers ever since, and we will briefly examine some of the answers they have provided and have argued about in their efforts to understand the good life for humans. In Part I of this book, we will explore the meaning of ethics and, in Part II, its application to the task of management. There have been managers for thousands of years, but not nearly as many as there are now. In the Western world, the only large organizations until the eighteenth century were churches and armies.2 For most of human history, people have worked at home, for themselves or their families, and essentially without bosses or managers. This is still true of a significant number of all humans alive today. Our concern in this book, however, is with those who work in organizations with structured authority. If you visit your local bookstore and go to the section covering business, you will find
shelves full of books on leadership. You will find books telling you how to be a good manager in one minute or how to learn what MBAs know in a matter of hours. You will find books on investing, and on selling, and on starting new businesses. One area of management on which you will find almost nothing is on how to be an ethical manager.
