Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT: At the end of 2015, car manufacturing industry was rocked by the disclosure of an unethical practice used by Volkswagen, one of the most prominent actors within automotive industry. Following the research on environmental procedures conducted by the International Council of Clean Transporation (ICTT) and West Virginia University, representatives of the Volskswagen group (VW) have been forced to admit that they had deliberately installed some "defeat devices" aimed at reducing the amount of emissions registered during vehicle testing under laboratory conditions. Thus, on road vehicle tests revealed a 0.85 g km-1 level of NOx emissions for VW Jetta and VW Passat, exceeding over four times the maximum limit of 0.18 g km-1 stipulated by the European regulations. Taking into consideration the direct impact on health condition of the people living in the affected countries and the huge amount of costs associated whith the overflow of pollution form VW cars, the paper brings into focus some systems of ethical analysis provided by the literature - utilitarianism, the ethics of virtues, universalism and teleological theory - in order to demonstrate why this unethical business practice severely altered sustainability principles and should be eradicated in the future.
KEY WORDS: unethical practice, utilitarian theory, virtue ethics, deonthological ethics, utilitarianism, teleological theory.
JEL CLASSIFICATION: M14, Q01, K32.
1.INTRODUCTION
Business ethics takes into account the moral conduct of corporations in relation with employees and business partners on the one hand, respectively with customers and consumers on the other. From a macroeconomic perspective, the application of ethics is an approach that influences the functioning of the entire economic system, because immoral behaviors can distort the functioning mechanisms of the market, affect the quality of the environment or seriously harm the interests of consumers. Being a process of evaluating actions, pragmatic ethics uses as general reference the generally accepted moral standards at the society level. Viewed from a specific ethical point of view, moral standards or norms are imperative statements that determine what a conscious individual should do or not do, so that his or her conduct is judged appropriate by the people or community. As a consequence, the moral demands of the society are embodied in the economic practice in the form of these norms of behavior. Another...