What we do
The focus from the beginning for the Ethics group was just ethics, and thereby our name. As time passed by, the subject sustainable development also entered into the group’s activities and work and today both subjects are on our agenda. The name is still the same because of the simple reason that it would be easiest that way.
Ethics and Morale – is there a difference?
Is there really a difference between ethic and morale? The answer is yes and no, it all depends on how you look at it. The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, which mean custom. Morale on the other side origins from the Latin word moralis, and means “what relates to customs”. There are no differences made between these conceptions within philosophy, it’s rather seen as words from different languages. In everyday language it’s usually said that ethics refers to moral philosophy, or the science of right and wrong, while morale refers to what people use to adjust behaviour.
What is Sustainable Development?
The idea of Sustainable Development was coined on the global arena 1978 in connection to the UN-report “Our Common Future”, also known as The Brundtland Report. In this report, Sustainable Development is defined as a development that “…meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. At the same time as the standard of living is getting better and better for today’s generations, the future generations should have as good standard of living as we have now.
Sustainable Development is based on three parts:
• Ecological Sustainability – in long-term maintain the water’s, the earth’s and the eco-system’s production-ability and reduce the effect on the environment.
• Social Sustainability – in long-term build a stable and dynamic society where the fundamental human needs is fulfilled.
• Economic Sustainability – economize with human and material resources in long-term.
Well, what about Ethics and Sustainability at LundaEkonomerna?
It’s easy that ethics and sustainable development ends up with just nice words. To avoid that ethics and sustainability ends up as products in forms of codes and policies, it is necessary that the subjects are integrated in an organisation in a way that don’t take all the focus from their normal activity. Ethics work without application has no value at all. It needs to be integrated in a sustainable way and how this is done differs from organisation to organisation. There is no universal solution for this unfortunately. We have chosen to start to build up the Ethics group as a group within LundaEkonomerna. It’s not easy to learn all the methods and different ways of working, and second of all it’s not very easy to find this knowledge. There are for sure a lot of people that tries to work with ethics and sustainability, but it’s not an easy task to enter all questions in a sustainable way in organisations. We have started to try to create arenas where students of the School of Economics and Management get the opportunity to meet question in the areas of ethics and sustainability. You’re welcome to read more about them under the different departments on our webpage.
Questions, comments? Don’t hesitate to contact us: etik@lundaekonomerna.se.
