Ethics is the mind set and culture to do the right thing directed by a code of standards and values. There isn’t one standard of ethics for business and a separate standard for personal life.

High moral standards and principled decision-making, ethics, basically, is honesty in action. In other words, the ethical person’s actions are consistent with his values. He doesn’t say one thing and do another.

In fact, ethics is doing the right thing when no one but you will ever know what decision you make.

Bad morals make big news, such as the financial practices of Texas-based Enron Corp. Apparently, small-business owners do a better job than Enron executives. In a Gallup Poll, 75 percent of respondents said they trust people who run small businesses, but only 23 percent trust chief executives of large corporations. And only 41 percent said “most people” can be trusted.

Unfortunately, many in the United States today question whether society’s moral standards are slipping. In a Gallup Poll, only 1 percent of people who responded rated the country’s moral values “excellent,” and another 17 percent said they were “good.” But 40 percent rated national moral values “poor.” Furthermore, 67 percent of the people in the same survey said moral values in the United States were getting worse.

After the 2002 disclosures of corporate financial wrong doing, President George W. Bush said, “At this moment, America’s greatest economic need is higher ethical standards.”