Ethics - the willingness to keep agreements. Looks solely at factual data like written agreements, established law, voting records, communications, and writing. Was an agreement made and was the agreement kept?
Morality - Long term consideration for decisions that affect the human environment. Based on human behaviors, pattern analysis, fallacy analysis, and subconcious responses.
These two concepts are looked at like synonyms to many people but they rarely have the same context even if they may seem similar.
Similar sounding words, concepts, perceptions, and contexts are part of professional environments because it has a lot to do with communications, confusing similarities, and misrepresentation because a failure to exchange correct concepts in a situation involving an agreement can result in accusations of fraud.
The word ethics is due to an evolution of professional environments; where modern workplaces include ethics, conduct, and agreements. Some of these terms seem similar due to grammatical changes in the recent past.
- Professional Conduct
- Professional Ethics
- Business Morals
- Business Conduct
- Business Ethics
- Professional Conduct and Business Ethics
- Professional Ethics and Business Conduct
These new terms came as a result of conversations on uniform standards for modern workplaces.
Often the new words break down as follows:
- Professional Ethics - good, bad, average, neutral, score from 0 to 100. Percentage, ratio, or perception on completing agreements.
- Professional Conduct - often, not a context of most workplaces but it can be. Yelling at co-workers, arriving late, missing meetings, letting the team down. Bad conduct can be a result of bad ethics, and good conduct can be a result of good ethics; or it can be completely unrelated.
- Conduct is often addressed by HR, a worker policy manual, or and industry governance board.
- Ethics is often a perception of a person, or a track record; they have a track record of having good ethics on meeting business agreements.
- Business Ethics - are often the same thing but as an organizational score. How does the organization perform overall with the entirety of its workers. This can be financially, environmentally, or community based. What are the public perceptions of the organization?
- Business Conduct - in most organization, the worker manual defines acceptable workplace conduct. Is this acceptable to workers, vendors, customers, clients, and governing boards like those used for medical licensing or to manage unused material in a factory.
Most people use the terms
Professional Ethics and Business Conduct because ethics are viewed as individual based, even if a group may share the same ethics; conduct is viewed as a group requirement, a person alone and by themselves, rarely has to be concerned with conduct. The analysis can get confusing, business conduct is also viewed as the interest profile and performance rate on agreements.
Morals are usually not talked about in the workplace; businesses aren't concered with what people are thinking; they are concerned with what people have decided and if there is an opportunity to circulate money or create economic activity. Morality questions are often examined under ethics in business or professional environments, will any agreements be violated or broken if the organization is allowed to engage in certain conduct.
Standards, guidelines, workplace expectations, and complaint processes are all part of modern workplaces. Morality questions are often examined individually outside the workplace and can lead to a vote, or decision that there is a conflict of interest with an employer. These votes can result in new business agreements or requirements, or not change the workplace at all.
This evolved in the US over the past 30 years, based on coming up with two things that will make a person successful at work and seeing which two things are the most popular:
- Shower, Brush Teeth, Comb Hair
- Press Clothes, Shine Shoes (1995-1999)
- Hygeine
- Physical Appearance
- Don't steal from work
- Don't get your employer sued (2002-2005)
- Financial Responsibility
- Professionalism
- Follow the Rules
- Ask lots of Questions (2010-2012)
- Compliance
- Workplace Inclusion
Because ethics mostly has to do with completing agreements, a worker must often decide if an agreement can be made based on legal requirements, obligations, time commitments, conflicts of interest, qualifications, eligibility, costs, required participants, and governing board procedures.
Doing an ethics analysis on a potential agreement is usually called due diligence and can be a simple as a Q&A on new agreements, or it may involve a traditional process with required screening before an approval for work can be completed. These processes are often simplified in modern workplaces and use updated language.
The environment can have multiple meanings. It can mean the natural earth environment that is based on life sciences; or, it can mean our surroundings and the acceptable conduct within those surroundings.
When examining laws as part of due diligence or a new business agreement; its helpful to remember the following context:
Laws are majority agreements about acceptable behaviors within a geographical area. The area can be a city, state, country, or world.
When laws become common throughout large areas, a person can be certain that their behaviors will be acceptable while traveling. For example, when the laws are similar throughout 3 countries, those specific laws with similarities, are common laws in the tri country area. Common laws can be regional or global.
Rules are set based on laws, and agreements are made to explain what rules were used within a specific set of laws. Crimes occur when there is a breach of agreement with majority expected behaviors. Many times, majorities agree that minorities can have some behaviors that are different than what the majority agreed to because it does not conflict with the majority or does not cause an inconvenience.
Because professional workplaces are often focused on agreements, the main focus is usually compliance and due diligence.
Compliance is a designation that majority expected behaviors are being followed, and that agreements are being completed with acceptable conduct.
Workplaces today, vary from those of a long time ago or even the recent past. Because of Moore's law, starting in 2010, computing professionals where able to make 25 years of human progress every 6 months. This lead to automating over 40% of professional office work by 2016 which lead to further advances.
What are 2 things that can make workers successful between 2022 and 2028?
What advances can humans make by 2032?
Are further computer developments based on Moore's law necessary?
What changes are possible in human environments between 2025 and 2040?