Ethical Decision-Making in Business for Advancing SDG 16: Promoting peace, justice, and strong institutions through moral management

Abstract

As per SDG 16, achieved sustainable development goals (SDG 16), peace, justice, and effective institutions are being considered and promoted as key growth factors as well as resilience of the global portfolio. To fulfill this objective within the corporate world, it is important to incorporate the ethical decision-making elements in the organizational activities so as to make them transparent, accountable and respectful of the human rights. The paper brings out how moral management systems can contribute to the individual business operations and relate to SDG 16 through integrity in governance, fair labor practices, and anti-corruption systems, as well as socially responsibly investments. Based on the recent literature and cases, we discuss how ethical theories, namely stakeholder theory, deontological approach, and virtue ethics can be applied into the corporate governance systems. The methodology is a synthesis of qualitative analysis of previous researches and thematization of organizational ethics programs. Results show that businesses with internalized news of moral thinking in their strategic options enjoy a better stakeholder trust, less regulatory issues and even have better institutional legitimacy. Nevertheless, there are still issues of balancing international ethics with local, socio-political contexts. The paper ends up with mentioning practical restraints and difficulties such as measurement issues and profit instances of stakeholders unwilling to participate in ethical assessment plus, leaves a topic of future study or research which entails the creation of culturally adaptive tools of ethical evaluation in global businesses.