THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICAL OBJECTIVES IN BUSINESS
As the world population is increasing day by day, the demand for food also goes through the roof. To satisfy the demand for food, firms try to produce as much food as possible and therefore, ethical objective is a very important factor that decides how firms follow the laws to produce healthy food and avoid food contamination. In addition, it also applies a set of moral principles to all interactions with stakeholders, such as its treatment of employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders. Therefore, firms have to set their ethical objectives in order to reach ethical values as well as maximize profit and improve their reputation. Moreover, setting ethical objectives will leave great impact on consumer psychology and society’s attitude towards the firms.
Firstly, setting ethical objectives brings back many advantages that can strengthen the firms in the competition to their opponents. Two essential factors that decide the existence of firms are: profit and consumers’ belief. If the consumers feel safe when they use healthy food from a particular firm, they will support for that firm and help the firm spread their reputation for “free”. That results in the increasing in the amount of consumers who buy the food from the firm and for certain, the profit will definitely increase. It can be compared to killing two birds with one stone. To produce healthy food, the firms will have to follow the ethical objectives that they set up before. Specifically, the objective must be known by every employee in every stage of making food. The procedure must be carried out carefully to ensure that all bacteria, virus, harmful microorganisms were killed and as a result, produced food will be clean and healthy to the consumers. Once there is no incident occurring, then the firm is successful. Overall, we can say that setting ethical objectives bring back huge advantages to the firms not only in maximising profit but getting support from consumers also. As an example in the video “Food Inc.”, from the safe food standpoint, Beef Production Inc. in Nebraska committed to produce healthy meat that used for 70% amount of hamburger around the city. They are willing to invest their money on technology, utilize the “marriage” of science and technology to design their own machine that used ammonia and ammonia hydroxide to kill bacteria including E. coli on the purpose of lessening the incidents of E. coli 0157:07. As a result, they receive a lot of support from consumers that help them to beat other competitors in meat producing industry and achieve what all others firms desire by setting ethical principles in their production.