Discuss The Movie That Show The Importance Of Ethics To A Tobacco Company

QUESTION 3

How does the movie show the importance of ethics to a business, especially a tobacco company? Explain your answer.

Ethics, particularly Business Ethics, is “concerned about the areas of moral principles and decision making, governance issues and codes of conduct for a business (Goel and Ramanathan).” Nowadays, companies want to maintain higher ethical standards in their practices as consumers prefer businesses that engage in fair and justifiable marketing activities. Consumers are increasingly more aware of unethical business practices due to the availability of mass media channels that brings issues such as this to the attention of the public. Most of today’s consumers show negative reactions when they know certain companies employ

Ethics in business plays an important role as it serves as a guideline for proper ethical behaviour and helps to avoid possible lawsuits (Salehi, Saeidinia and Aghaei). Simply put, ethics in business help companies to prevent negative consequences that can result from being unethical. If there is no ethics, companies – including tobacco companies – will do things in the most convenient way, and they will do what they must to win regardless of the consequences (Maxwell 5). For instance, as seen in the movie, the C.E.O. of Brown and Williamson stated that cigarettes and nicotine do not meet the classic definitions of addiction even though nicotine is indeed addictive. They explained that it is safe because cigarettes have no intoxication. By doing so, they made an outright lie to the public all simply for the sake of gaining profit from their

In the cases of most corporate cultures, the general practice is to follow what the senior leaders do and either emulate it or best it. When leaders are unethical, employees have no incentive to follow the footsteps of these leaders. Making things worse would be a divide in the company’s employees due to a crack in trust. All these would inherently lead to a disruptive work environment which can affect the company’s productivity.

Company will also lose their credibility when the public discovers that the company they trusted and believed in lied to them (Zeiger). The company’s word is then no longer trusted, their deceptions fall apart, and their power is lost. This also could be proved by another real-life example: Enron’s company bankrupted in the end because he hid mountains of debt and toxic assets from investors and creditors. These companies could be completely destroyed because of the lies that they have