Virtue Ethics In Enron

Pride Goeth Before Destruction Enron, the quintessential company of the 1990’s, is infamous for its rise and more so for its fall. It’s bankruptcy and dissolution in 2001 was the largest in US corporate history to date when it occurred (Ferrell, Fraedrich, & Ferrell 487). The downfall of the company was brought about by shady accounting practices, a cutthroat company culture, a do-what-it-takes mantra. Ultimately, the prideful and greedy natures of the executives at the helm lead to the dissolution and investigation of the company that cost many people their livelihoods. All which may have been prevented if Enron had been operated under a different normative theory: virtue ethics. This paper intends to give a brief background of Enron and its operation as well as briefly touch on what went wrong and elaborate on how this scandal may have been avoided. Initially, Enron was the …show more content…
Throughout the 1990s, this work continued to expand as it generated and served electricity those in the industrial or business sections across the US and steadily grew into an energy company to contend with (Ferrell, Fraedrich, & Ferrell 486). However, this was just the beginning, as the company grew and acquired different deals and side projects, what exactly Enron did was the source of much debate. In one interview, then-CEO Jeffrey Skilling was reported as having avoided the question of what Enron did to generate its sizeable profits (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). The main source of their income appeared to spawn from their approach of “introducing the laws of supply and demand into the energy system (Keller 2002)”. This market, previously held by government-regulated monopolies, meant a new frontier and new ways for a private energy company such as Enron to flourish.