Ethics and Sustainability: Contemporary Issues and Frameworks

This essay addresses two key ethical and sustainability issues faced by contemporary businesses: economic inequality and workplace diversity. The essay identifies economic inequality as a significant concern, highlighting its link to human rights abuses and the impact of market practices. The ethical framework of justice, emphasizing equality and human rights, is proposed to address this issue. The second issue, workplace diversity, is examined, emphasizing the importance of ethical conduct and the influence of varied backgrounds within an organization. The rights approach, which prioritizes respect for human integrity and employee autonomy, is presented as a suitable framework for managing workplace diversity. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of business ethics and sustainability for organizational performance and the significance of environmental appraisal in fostering ethical supplier relationships.

Running head: ETHICS AND SUSTAINABILITY
Ethics and Sustainability
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

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Introduction
A business organization’s legal responsibility is with regards to sustainability. In
industry, the three sustainability dimensions involve social, cultural, and environmental
concerns. Company’s position in managing all these three issues depends on the organization’s
management activities (Quarshie, Salmi & Leuschner, 2016). Business ethics offers a theoretical
empirical context by which handling activity in general and efficiency in particular can be
measured. This study aims to identify two issues of the contemporary business with their ethical
frameworks.
Identification of issue 1
The first identified issue of the business is Economic inequality. Most generally
economic inequality refers to the study of the disparity degree within an economy. This analysis
is achieved by calculating the sum of revenue, property, or expense spread across a chosen
population and geographic region. Economic inequality is rapidly becoming one of today’s key
concerns (Bapuji & Mishra, 2015). They are none who can dispute the argument that injustice,
human rights and industry are inextricably linked. Severe injustice is both a source of human
rights abuses and a consequence of them. Human rights abuses not only fuel injustice such
as degradation of civil rights, sexism, obstacles to democratic participation, but unequal
environments are often more prone to face threats to broad-based human rights security
(Guillaume, Dawson, Otaye‐Ebede, Woods & West, 2017). It is also impossible to ignore the
connection between market practices and increasing inequalities of the economic, because

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corporate tax corruption and the prioritization of shareholder preferences tended to funnel
income and capital away from employees.
Ethical framework for addressing issue 1
Decisions about right and wrong are permeating daily life. Ethics will affect all aspects of
life: professionally behaving as people, building responsible organizations and states, and
making the community ethical. Because of lack of the justice, there can economic inequality in
the business organization, which can be injustice to the source of human rights abuses as well as
the consequence of them (Cottone, 2014). The approach to justice should be extended to all
individual beings if paired with the commitment to human rights. Only ethical values are those
that should be preferred in an initial circumstance of equality among free and rational
individuals. Such hypothetical rule is called reasonable or just as it includes a framework on
what constitutes as a rational conduct, and is not concerned about the implications of such acts.
The definition behind what is perceived to be right is justice of starting point.
Identification of issue 2
The second identified issue of the business is workplace diversity. Ethics and diversity
are part of every culture are the big issues that has developed into a losing condition for all
concerned, contributing to corporate demoralization. No doubt many conclude that when
correctly handled, social diversity and ethics are the basic elements for organizational
performance (Bond & Haynes, 2014). There are varied values, history, ethnicity, age, class and
educational background among workers, managers and executives of companies of any company
need to learn what are the most ethically acceptable or unethical courses of action to pursue of

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their everyday workplace circumstances. Diversity is the manner in which individuals vary in an
organisation that may impact employee activities or relationships. While ethics is the theory of
moral morality, or the distinction of right and wrong this encompasses actions such as ethical
judgments which actions of social responsibility.
Ethical framework for addressing issue 2
The Approach to Rights is about regard for human integrity. This philosophy argues that
our freedom is dependent on our willingness to freely chose how to live lives, and that the
employees have a fundamental responsibility to value the decisions as autonomous, fair and
reasonable individuals, and a moral obligation to honor others in the same manner. Using the
ethical framework for Rights approach can effectively address the workplace diversity among the
employees (Koehn, 2017). This approach describes the occupational worker’s legal privileges, in
a particular circumstance, and their responsibilities and obligations. Consider as well
everybody’s social, civil, and contractual interests are upheld and covered by the operation, and
determine as often people involved are regarded as completely educated, human beings with the
ability to free consent rather than as a way of winding up and workplace diversity. As such, the
conscientious conduct should be the one we have a legal duty to take and would not infringe
certain people’s freedoms.
Conclusion
This can be concluded by this study that the environmental performance is based on
business ethics and sustainability, and that it is essential for a organization, especially when
this adopts an EMS. Therefore, the environmental appraisal of the suppliers is very relevant to

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the company as it encourages integrity and cordial partnerships with various suppliers, a
condition which may boost the competitiveness and credibility of the company. On sustainability
concerns, the essay identified that factors such as social, cultural, and climate play a significant
role in deciding a company’s performance.

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References
Bapuji, H., & Mishra, S. (2015). Inequality and organizations. The Routledge companion to
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Guillaume, Y. R., Dawson, J. F., Otaye‐Ebede, L., Woods, S. A., & West, M. A. (2017).
Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of
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