Ethics, Safety and Managers

Abstract

Much has been written over the past 25 years about business ethics, yet little of this literature has focused on safety in the workplace. What has been written about the relationship between safety and ethics falls into three broad categories: 1) regulation, 2) accidents, and 3) engineering. None of these three broad categories has added substantially, however, to the understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand management decision making and, on the other, ethics and safety in the workplace. This paper focuses on the development of a framework for safety and ethics and workplace. In undertaking the development of this framework, it is important to discuss previous literature examining the relationship between safety and ethics. It is also my objective in writing this paper to shift the focus in examining the relationship between safety and ethics from one of disaster to one of less well-known workplace accidents. What literature has been written examining the relationship between safety and ethics overwhelmingly focuses on disastrous failures in safety (e.g. Bophal or Three Mile Island). Too often, ethicists focus their attention on accidents with dramatic?mini-series?consequences, but in so doing unintentionally shift focus from fundamental ethical questions. Since at least the turn-of-the-century there has been an interest in the relationship between ethics and safety, but this interest has been often allied with class and ideological movements. Upton Sinclair, the noted American novelist, made a literary career in condemning the excesses of American