A Guide to Ethics and the Creation of Trust

Published in the Venue Management Association newsletter, March 1998

Much has been said and written about ethics of late, covering a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from drug cheating by Chinese swimmers to embezzlement and fraud by business people. But how many people really have more than a vague idea of what ethics is and how it applies to life in the late 20^th century ?

Mozart said that ‘true genius resides in simplicity’ and it is an adage which is most applicable in an age dominated by information overload and the twenty-second television grab. Although ethics covers many issues and realms of conduct, at its center is a key question, ‘How ought we to live ?’. Not ‘How can we live ?’ but, in an ideal world, ‘How ought we to live ?’. Of course the difficulty is that the world is not ideal and in trying to answer the central question, many different approaches can be taken.

These approaches can however, be consolidated into three main schools of thought, represented by three further questions; ‘What is right ?’, ‘What is good ?’, and ‘What is fittin…