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Business And/Or Ethics? A Framework For Resolving Multicriteria Decision Dilemmas, E. Susanna Cahn

Communications of the IIMA

Corporate leadership is often in the unenviable position of balancing ethical choices and profit. Business decisions consider alternatives and make choices to further strategic business goals. Measures of business success are likely to be financial, including profit, revenue, sales, market share, cost of production, quality of products, innovative product development. Ethical decisions are choices among right and wrong outcomes or processes. Assessment of ethical choices may or may not be easily quantified, including consideration of positive and negative consequences, moral principles, and fair process. Inevitably, then, the inherent nature of business-ethics decisions will involve multiple decision criteria, including both business …