In the business world, there are two critical determinants: the Legal Dimension, which discusses business compliance with the laws and regulations of the country in which it operates, and the Ethical Dimension, which discusses the business's observance of the country's system of values, customs, and traditions (Carroll, 1991).
Legal but Unethical:
US laws do not prevent companies from looking for loopholes in the tax code to reduce taxes for business owners. For example, some companies move their headquarters outside the United States to escape taxes. However, this act seems completely unethical because these companies make billions of consumers here, and they have a social responsibility to them (Michael, 2006).
Ethical but Illegal:
In some countries, technical media and software are not available for purchase. This is due to the need for an agent in the country or the government ban on this software. Many members of these communities consider downloading and using such software from the Internet as ethically acceptable behavior (BRONI, 2010).
Young's Article
According (Young, 2019), Young discusses an incident that occurred in Philadelphia between 2014 and 2016, when Uber entered as a competitor to the regular taxi, whose owners should have been holders of a medal whose price exceeded 545,000 dollars in 2014 when the 2016 Pennsylvania law was passed accepting TNCs like Uber, the owners of the regular taxi was severely affected. Some of them switched to Uber itself, although antitrust cases have been brought against Uber from many parties in the state. However, all of them were dropped because the intent and mechanisms of monopoly were not proven (Law Justia, 2018).
Outcome
Young argued in her article that it is not necessarily the behavior of a company; some may see it as unethical to necessarily be illegal, or even dishonest in general, as it is clear that the medal for the city taxi is obligatory to restrict drivers to a certain quality such as the validity of the car and the efficiency of the drivers. Still, these limitations are included by Uber daily with other criteria such as the evaluation of the driver and his/her car, in addition to a re-examination of his/her vehicle's papers and efficiency, in addition to the fact that the car itself is modern. Therefore, Uber is not obligated to purchase the medal either on a legal or even ethical side (Young, 2019).
Conclusion
Not all legal standards are necessarily ethical standards. There are already places of convergence and harmony, but the laws don't need to agree and differ in what people agree and disagree on; each work has its own standards and limitations, and these standards vary according to the times, for example, in the United States some businesses were completely illegal in the past, such as selling liquor, there was almost agreement on the immorality of selling it, but now the sale of alcohol is legal and socially acceptable.
References
BRONI, J. V. G. (2010). Ethical dimensions in business conduct: Business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and the law. The "ethics in business" is a sense of business ethics. In International Conference On Applied Economics–ICOAE (p. 795).
Carroll, A. B. (1991). The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34(4), 39-48.
Law Justia. (2018). Philadelphia Taxi Association, Inc. v. Uber Technologies Inc, No. 17-1871 (3d Cir. 2018) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca3/17-1871/17-1871-2018-03-27.html
Michael, M. L. (2006). Business ethics: The law of rules. Business Ethics Quarterly, 16(4), 475-504.
Young, C. (2019). Putting the law in its place: Business ethics and the assumption that illegal implies unethical: JBE. Journal of Business Ethics, 160(1), 35-51. Retrieved from ProQuest One Academic in the TUW Library.