Governmental regulations represent the minimum standards for organizational conduct. Moreover, all laws that deal with safety, health and the legal process itself have ethical foundations. Ethics also deals with many matters that the law addresses inadequately or not at all. History is replete with unethical laws. Apartheid in South Africa is but one example.
Laws subjugating women are others.
More is required of an organization than reciting that all its members of the organization will abide by the law. An effective ethics program must harmonize the values of the organization with the values embedded in the law. Where they cannot be harmonized, it must be able to guide policy-makers as to how to act when the two conflict. As the figure above depicts, the law also deals with some matters that are either not the concern of ethics or are themselves unethical. Some regulations might, for example, even be unethical viewed from the organization s perspective.