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Are business ethics or profits more important?

This Debate has 18 articles on the Ethics side and 7 articles on the Profits side. Click here to see all the articles rated and ranked by Helium members.

Ethics

Profits

3 of 7

Profits

I would love to say ethics is important to any business, but unfortunately it is not.
Without Profits you can not exist, and without ethics you can still exist.
It takes profit to run any business, from the moment you open the door it is all about
the money.

It would be great it you could for go the profit for ethics, but you can't pay your employees, and they can by groceries with and over abundance of ethics.
It takes profit to repay the business license and start up costs, and profits to
employ those necessary to run the business. Depending on the type of business profit may
be necessary to buy what is need to supply the business as well as employees.

Morality and ethics may be close to the same thing, but they are rarely considered at least
not until a business has an abundance of profits sitting to one side. However, when that happens there are other hands out that require you to continue to look toward the profits and
not the ethical side of a business.

Humanity has made it impossible for the current business owner to maintain a business that does not think of profit first. Unlike many years ago when a store owner might mark something down because they know you can't afford it as is. But I am talking many years ago like "Little House On the Prairie Days" When peoples feelings, and economic status were taken into consideration before pricing and profit. When you could barter or trade one item for another without thinking of how much extra you were getting, because you just needed what you traded for, and nothing more, no profit needed.

Nowadays however it is all about the bottom line. There is no existence without it.
There is nothing else considered without the profit being taken into consideration.
It is sad that this is the life business have taken on. We can certainly thank our government for that. Because it all started with charging taxes. Prices had to be raised, profits increased to cover the taxes being charged by the government.

So now we have no choice but to push ethics to the side. Along with ignoring ethics we have chosen to ignore morality, or have any consideration for the underdog who is unable to meet
the rising costs, that push us to our profits.