What Is Ethical Judgment?

What is Ethical Judgment?
After the scandals of companies such as Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco International, ethics in business has become one of the most important issues facing American businessesand a main focus of the media.  To embed ethics in our decision making process, it is very important to understand what ethics is.  The last decades have witnessed a growing interest in explainingethical and unethical behaviors in both scholars and practitioners perspectives. Many scholars and practitioners have sought to answer the following questions.  What is ethical or unethical? Why ethicaljudgments are different?
According to Hunt and Vitell (1986), ethical judgment is the process of considering several alternatives and choosing the most ethical alternative.  For Rest (1986), ethicaljudgment is the process by which an individual determines that one alternative is morally right and another alternative is morally wrong.  Respectively known as Hunt–Vitell model and Rest’sfour-component model, these definitions are two of the most cited in the literature of business ethics.
These two models are very similar. Normative ethical theories are classified into two categories:deontological and teleological theories (Murphy & Laczniak, 1981).  Deontological theories focus on the decision maker’s specific behaviors or actions, while teleological theories focus on theconsequences of these behaviors or actions (Chang, Chen, & Chen, 2008).  Both the Hunt–Vitell model and Rest’s four-component model tie with both the deontological and teleological theories. The two modelsgive an individual the opportunity to compare various alternatives and perceive the possible consequences of each alternative for various stakeholders.  In both models, the decision maker has more thanone option to choose from.
Although they are very similar, the two models also present some distinctions.  The Hunt–Vitell model requires the decision maker to compare various alternatives, while...