Why Business Ethics Consider Oxymoron?

An oxymoron (plural oxymora or oxymorons) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, "sharp dull") is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymora appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.


The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:
"And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron)

Calling "business ethics" an oxymoron rightly recognizes that ethics is a challenge. This much is true. That said, I think that this cliche also betrays a deep error in the way that many think about ethics in business. This error can be costly for business and it should be cleared up once and for all.

Calling "business ethics" an oxymoron conveys the misguided assumption that ethical commitment and conduct have to be 100% in order to be valid. In other words, if you're going to be ethical you have to be a pious. Like being pregnant, being ethical is thought to be an all-or-nothing proposition: you either are or you aren't.

It's certainly not bad to strive for ethical perfection, but it can be very destructive to insist upon it. Demanding 100% ethical perfection can have the unintended reverse consequence of discouraging people from trying to be ethical at all. When faced with the impossible, sometimes people just give up.

The hard realities of business require give-and-take among people as they strive for pragmatic solutions. These solutions aren't always perfect, but they often represent the best we can achieve. So, we shouldn't give up, by saying it is impossible to join "business" and "ethics," simply because it is sometimes hard to put our ethics into practice.

The examples for oxymoron is cigarettes. There are several issues under product ethics which are harmful product, quality deterioration, planned obsolescence, brand similarity, counterfeit merchandise, deceptive packaging, and product endorsement. Companies that sells cigarettes are under unethical product practice because they sell harmful products.

There are about four thousand harmful chemicals in a single cigarette. There are many casualties resulted from smoking and other chronic diseases such as lungs and mouth cancers, stroke and many more diseases resulted from smoking. However, government could not abolish the selling of cigarettes because it provides a lot of profit towards the Malaysian’s economy and there are also politics aspects that are tangled in selling cigarettes.