This technical note on ethics builds on and further develops the conversation about ethics. It provides background, language, and concepts to identify and analyze managerial problems from an ethics perspective. The focus of our use of these tools is to help managers understand the ethical dimensions of their decisions and to make defensible choices. Part 1 provides a brief summary of four traditions in ethics that are a key starting point for discussing what ethics is and how it works. Part 2 takes the broad summary from Part 1 and uses it to form four "decision rules" that are focused on application and used by managers to understand the moral dimensions of a given case. Part 3 highlights some of the key moral dimensions of thinking about ethics in a global context and provides a number of useful resources. Part 4 presents a series of tools for pushing decision-making in order to foster better choices and to limit the tendency to "rationalize" decisions.
