Ethics in the Future Manager’s Professional Training

Czech expert literature in the field of business ethics is not so wide as in Western Europe but business or professional ethics has become a vital part of study programmes of faculties with non-humanistic studies. Business ethics pays close attention to the international character of business. The key question is whether or not there is any common set of values shared by all people of all cultural and historical backgrounds. Western multinationals are in practice unable to prevent shoddy labour practices in their overseas factories. The discrepancy between “the-what-is” and “the-what-should-be” is probably the main problem in the field of ethics. With this in mind, we have been teaching Business Ethics at the Faculty of Informatics and Management for more than 10 years. The method of teaching which proves to be the most suitable is based on studying and discussing case studies. Students are taught how to approach these problems and that the pursuit of profit should always be ethical. Teaching ethics at FIM UHK is based on basic anthropina, i.e. basic human characteristics, which differentiate humans from other living creatures, as well as on the European philosophical tradition and also on pre-philosophical, non-philosophical as well as non-European philosophical foundations of ethics. We ground our course in traditional ethical concepts and problems (e.g. the origin, essence and function of morality, relations between morality and law, reason and emotion in decision-making and acting, individualism and universalism, subjectivism and objectivism as well as transversalism) and concentrate on the discussed problems of contemporary ethics – mainly business ethics. We respect multi-level ethical analysis covering the universal – global dimension, the dimension of socio-cultural changes in current heterogeneous societies, professional and institutional dimension as well as company codes of conduct, and the dimension of individual morality.