Sustainale management futures Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Sustainale management futures - Essay Example Apparently, the author argued that business and ethics are two contradictory notions that have been brought together. Nonetheless, growing corporate malpractices has highlighted demand of corporate or business ethics significantly. Crane and Matten (2010) defined business ethics as assessment of a particular business situation or activity or decision that involve moral dilemma related to right and wrong. In business ethics, moral correctness is stress upon instead of commercially, strategically and financially correctness. Although there are several instances of violation of business ethics, one of the greatest scandals from gas and oil industry has been selected for evaluation with respect to two ethical theories. The paper will evaluate incident of Gulf Oil Spill by British Petroleum (BP) in the lights of Utilitarianism theory and Kant’s Ethics of duties or deontology theory. The oil and gas industry has been considered for evaluation of ethical crisis in business because this industry is one of the essential sectors from the perspective of economic development and environmental impact. The United States alone consist of 24.7 percent of global oil share while accommodating other subsectors such as exploration and production of oil and gas. Significant oil and gas reserved in the nation has attracted several global players such as British Petroleum (Marketline, 2012a; Marketline, 2014). Oil spill is often considered as an unavoidable situation in the process of drilling and extraction but the situation can cause havoc if goes uncontrolled. Two such critical examples are spill by Exxon Valdez in the gulf coast of Alaska and BP spill at the Gulf of Mexico. Prior to discussing the spill and its ethical consequences, brief introduction regarding BP Plc has been provided in the following section (Hanson, 2014). BP Plc was founded in 1901 and currently, it is considered as one of the largest oil and gas