Online research in philosophy

Studies in marketing ethics often revealed that ethical gaps do exist between marketers and other groups in society. The existence of these ethical gaps could be extremely counterproductive for marketing management. In order to effectively narrow these gaps, a marketing manager must first have a better understanding of causes of these gaps. To this end, this study compares marketing professionals with consumers on some important determinants of the ethical decision-making process. In particular, the marketers and consumers were compared with respect (...) to their personal moral philosophies and ethical perceptions in marketing situations. The data were obtained from a national survey of the practitioner members of the American Marketing Association and members of a consumer panel of a major southern university in the United States. The results generally indicate that marketing professionals are different from consumers with respect to some of the determinants of ethical decisions investigated. Some important managerial implications based on these findings were discussed. (shrink)

This paper builds on previous work by Sirgy, M. J. (1999), Journal of Business Ethics 19, 193–206, dealing with issues of code of conduct of marketing educators. Sirgy developed a discussion document outlining a semblance of what might be construed as a code of ethics for marketing educators. The discussion document was debated and accompanied by three commentaries (Ferrell, O. C.: 1999, Journal of Business Ethics 19, 225–228; Kurtz, D. L.: 1999, Journal of Business Ethics 19, 207–209; (...) Malhotra, N. and G. L. Miller: 1999, Journal of Business Ethics 19, 211–224). One conclusion derived from the discussion document and the commentaries is the need to develop a code of ethics involving behaviors that most marketing educators find morally unacceptable. The current paper reports on a descriptive study involving a survey of marketing educators in which survey respondents were asked to rate the extent to which certain behaviors are deemed acceptable or unacceptable. The results of the survey identified certain behaviors deemed unacceptable by the vast majority of survey respondents. This evidence of hypernorms (a concept derived from social contract theory) within the community of marketing educators was used to propose an initial code of ethics. (shrink)