...CHAPTER SUMMARY – CHAPTER 1 – ETHICS IN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS Frequently, the ethically correct course of action is clear, and people in business act accordingly. Exceptions occur when there is uncertainty about ethical obligations in particular situations or when considerations of ethics come into conflict with the practical demands of business. In deciding on an ethical course of action, we can rely to some extent on the rules of right conduct that we employ in everyday life. However, business activity also has some features that might limit the applicability of our ordinary ethical views. One distinguishing feature of business is its economic character which can be summarized as the conduct of buyers and seller and employers and employees. A second distinguishing feature of business is that it typically takes place in organizations which is a hierarchical system of functionally defined positions designed to achieve some goal or set of goals. Because business involves economic relations and transactions that take place in markets and also in organizations, it raises ethical issues for which the ethics of everyday life has not prepared us. Decisions making occurs on several distinct levels: the level of the individual, the organization, and the business system. The level of the individual represents situations that confront them in the workplace and require them to make a decision about their own well-being. The level of the organization can be identified...
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...philosophers over many centuries. One of the arguments for God’s existence comes from the belief that the type of God that would exist is an all just and all-knowing supernatural being that has laid down objective moral laws for humans to follow. This is called the moral argument. In this paper I argue that the moral arguments does not stand against objections when trying to prove God’s existence. This paper has five parts beginning with a thorough outline and explanation of the moral argument (1). Next I will present four objections and the theists reply to them. First is that morality doesn’t depend on God’s existence only the belief in God (2). Second, that one cannot be truly...
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...Political Obligation First published Tue Apr 17, 2007; substantive revision Fri Apr 30, 2010 To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one's country or state. On that point there is almost complete agreement among political philosophers. But how does one acquire such an obligation, and how many people have really done what is necessary to acquire it? Or is political obligation more a matter of being than of doing — that is, of simply being a member of the country or state in question? To those questions many answers have been given, and none now commands widespread assent. Indeed, a number of contemporary political philosophers deny that a satisfactory theory of political obligation either has been or can be devised. Others, however, continue to believe that there is a solution to what is commonly called “the problem of political obligation,” and they are presently engaged in lively debate not only with the skeptics but also with one another on the question of which theory, if any, provides the solution to the problem. Whether political obligation is the central or fundamental problem of political philosophy, as some have maintained (e.g., McPherson), may well be doubted. There is no doubt, however, that the history of political thought is replete with attempts to provide a satisfactory account of political obligation, from the time of Socrates to the present. These attempts have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, but they have...
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...fiduciary relationships attract fiduciary duties. This article takes up the enigma. It assesses leading reductivist and instrumentalist analyses of the justification for fiduciary duties. Finding them wanting, it offers an alternative account of the juridical justification for fiduciary duties. The author contends that the fiduciary relationship is a distinctive kind of legal relationship in which one person (the fiduciary) exercises power over practical interests of another (the beneficiary). Fiduciary power is a form of authority derived from the legal capacity of the beneficiary or a benefactor. The duty of loyalty is justified on the basis that it secures the exclusivity of the beneficiary’s claim over fiduciary power so understood. Les obligations fiduciaires sont essentielles pour assurer l’intégrité de multiples relations, telles que celles entre administrateur et bénéficiaire, directeur et société, mandataire et mandant, avocat et client, médecin et patient, parent et enfant, ou enfin gardien et pupille. Malgré leur variété, toutes les relations fiduciaires sont présumées jouir de caractéristiques communes et générer un ensemble d’obligations juridiques,...
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...Critical Analysis: "The Social Responsibility of Busine Critical Analysis of "The Social Responsibility of Business" from Milton Friedman In this essay I evaluate Milton Friedman’s essay: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” in 1970, on the Social Responsibility of a business and his theory, which is called the “Efficiency Perspective”. In every article and book that I have read about social responsibility, Friedman’s “Efficiency Perspective is placed centrally. During my research I found that Friedman is often criticised for being too classical. Friedman believes that manager’s foremost objective or even moral obligation to the firm should be to maximise profits always. There is however one condition that makes his perspective more complicated, not only for me, but also for several well-known authors. According to Friedman, the managers obligations should be carried out: “…while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom”. This leads to one of the main questions of my essay: To what extent does Friedman’s “Efficiency Perspective” give foundation for responsible and moral international management behaviour? And need we any concern if it fails to do so? To fully answer the questions, I first need to explain the two different parts of the first question: responsible international management behaviour and moral international management behaviour. In businesses nowadays they...
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...In his essay “GENETIC INTERVENTIONS AND THE ETHICS OF ENHANCEMENT OF HUMAN BEINGS” by Julian Savulescu, the author supports the belief that genetic enhancement will become a channel to improve the quality of human lives (Savulescu, 879). Savulescu begins by raising the question of whether or not we should use medical technology for more than just curing diseases by suggesting to improve human lives by interceding on a biological level. He states that it is a morally accepted practice to improve or release one's suffering through medicine. If this is true, it would be permissible to intercede on a biological level if it does the same thing as treating disease. Savulescu main argument is that:1) biologically enhancing our children would...
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...morality. Morality are the standards that an individual or group has about what is right and wrong, or good and evil. Moral norms can usually be expressed as general rules or statements, such as “Always tell the truth”. Moral values can usually be expressed as statements describing objects or features of objects that have worth, such as “Honesty is good” and “Injustice is bad”. Five characteristics can help pin down the nature of moral standards. 1. Moral standards deal with matters that we think can seriously injure or seriously benefit human beings. 2. Moral standards are not established or changed by the decisions of particular legislative bodies. 3. We feel that moral standards should be preferred to other values including (especially?) self-interest. 4. Moral standards are based on impartial considerations. – that is, a point of view that does not evaluate standards according to whether they advance the interests of a particular individual or group, but one that goes beyond personal interests to a “universal” standpoint in which everyone’s interests are impartially counted as equal. 5. Moral standards are associated with special emotions and a special vocabulary. Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society. Ethics is the study of moral standards – the process of examining the moral standards of a...
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...morality. Morality are the standards that an individual or group has about what is right and wrong, or good and evil. Moral norms can usually be expressed as general rules or statements, such as “Always tell the truth”. Moral values can usually be expressed as statements describing objects or features of objects that have worth, such as “Honesty is good” and “Injustice is bad”. Five characteristics can help pin down the nature of moral standards. 1. Moral standards deal with matters that we think can seriously injure or seriously benefit human beings. 2. Moral standards are not established or changed by the decisions of particular legislative bodies. 3. We feel that moral standards should be preferred to other values including (especially?) self-interest. 4. Moral standards are based on impartial considerations. – that is, a point of view that does not evaluate standards according to whether they advance the interests of a particular individual or group, but one that goes beyond personal interests to a “universal” standpoint in which everyone’s interests are impartially counted as equal. 5. Moral standards are associated with special emotions and a special vocabulary. Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society. Ethics is the study of moral standards – the process of examining the moral...
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...BUSINESS ETHICS AND STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS Kenneth E. Goodpaster Abstract: Much has been written about stakeholder analysis as a process by which to introduce ethical values into management decision-making. This paper takes a critical look at the assumptions behind this idea, in an effort to understand better the meaning of ethica] management decisions. A distinction is made between stakeholder analysis and stakeholder synthesis. The two most natural kinds of stakeholder synthesis are then defined and discussed: strategic and multi-fiduciary. Paradoxically, the former appears to yield business without ethics and the latter appears to yield ethics without business. The paper concludes by suggesting that a third approach to stakeholder thinking needs to be developed, one that avoids the paradox just men* tioned and that clarifies for managers (and directors) the legitimate role of ethical considerations in decision-making. So we must think through what management should be accountable for; and how and through whom its accountability can be discharged. The stockholders' interest, both short- and long-term, is one of the areas. But it is only one. Peter Dnicker, 1988 Harvard Business Review W HAT is ethically responsible management? How can a corporation, given its economic mission, be managed with appropriate attention to ethical concerns? These are central questions in the field of business ethics. One approach to answering such questions that has become popular during...
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...The Uses and Abuses of Agency Theory in Business Ethics The spectacular corporate scandals and bankruptcies of the past decade have served as a powerful reminder of the risks that are involved in the ownership of enterprise. Unlike other patrons of the firm, owners are residual claimants on its earnings.1 As a result, they have no explicit contract to protect their interests, but rely instead upon formal control of the decision-making apparatus of the firm in order to ensure that their interests are properly respected by managers. In a standard business corporation, it is the shareholders who stand in this relationship to the firm. Yet as the recent wave of corporate scandals has demonstrated once again, it can be extraordinarily difficult for shareholders to exercise effective control of management, or more generally, for the firm to achieve the appropriate alignment of interests between managers and owners. After all, it is shareholders who were the ones most hurt by the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, Parmalat, Hollinger, and elsewhere. For every employee at Enron who lost a job, shareholders lost at least US$4 million.2 Furthermore, employees escaped with their human capital largely intact. Creditors and suppliers continue to pick over the bones of the corporation (which still exists, under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and continues to liquidate assets in order to pay off its debts).3 But as far as shareholders are concerned, their investments have simply evaporated...
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...Introduction Is there an obligation in part of MNCs to be morally upright in the eyes of the world? How wide do moral obligations extend within the global context? MNCs are entities within states that have a large capability in the eyes of the moral law to aid, protect and serve the public. However, in the search for profit, many MNCs will do only as much as they have to in order to be morally upstanding and financially sound. According to some philosophers, including Marx, the public must be protected from and by all organizations in their respective capacity; this includes the state and MNCs that, more often than not, have more power than the states in which they operate. Take, for instance, an MNC in El Salvador, profiting from the affordability of the production process, profiting from the lack of limitations within this one ‘weak-state’ and profiting from the sales accomplished overseas. The state of El Salvador is much weaker than an MNC such as Nike; in this example then, the MNC has the obligation to better the conditions of the state, not deprive it, aid or neglect its social responsibility to uphold ethics while practicing enterprising. This essay questions the reasoning behind Donaldson in Rights and Kinds of Obligations, arguing that O’Neill has a more fair system of distributing the right aid for the protection of all rights. The main question then is: what is the moral obligation of MNCs in the global context after having reviewed both Donaldson and O’Neill’s articles...
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...Case Study Analysis-D Critical Thinking Case Study Analysis: GOOGLE 1. Describe the philosophical principle Google's managers adopt when deciding that the benefits of operating in China outweighed the costs. Discuss the philosophical approaches to ethics. Describe the approaches that are favored by most moral philosophers and form the basis for current models of ethical behavior in international business. Google began to operate in China in 2000, it was two years later that the Chinese authorities blocked the site. Although this came as a surprise for the company’s managers, two weeks later the service was restored. It was clear that China was a strategically important market and Google couldn’t just ignore that. We begin our approach to philosophical ethics by describing what is called straw men. These approaches can be characterized as the Friedman doctrine, cultural relativism, the righteous moralist and the naive immoralist. The Friedman doctrine says that the only responsibility of business is to create profits, as long as the company remains within the rules of law. Yet this argument breaks down because the rules of the game are not well established and differ from country to country, and that may lead to inadequacies in a company’s social responsibility. The basic belief in cultural relativism is that a company should adopt the culture within which it is doing business. But serious contradiction arises from this approach, for example let’s assume that in one...
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...Revision: Questions & Answers Jurisprudence 2011–2012 David Brooke Senior Lecturer in Law and Module Leader in Jurisprudence at Leeds Metropolitan University Fifth edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the U S A and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009, 2011 David Brooke Previous editions published by Cavendish Publishing Limited First edition 1993 Second edition 1995 Third edition 2001 Previous editions published by Routledge-Cavendish Fourth edition 2009 The right of David Brooke to...
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...questions using moral philosophies. From the time when the short summary written in regards to the meaning and importance of the term ’responsible business’ in week 2, till today, I have explored various historical, moral, governance and economic aspects of business both domestically and internationally, proliferating my knowledge in regards to responsible commerce. I have come to understand the moral landscape or commercial enterprises which have helped me to appreciate the social and ethical dimensions of the business culture. The analysis of the James Hardie case and the Utilitarianism Theory depicts my knowledge growth. In doing so, I am able to now make more informed business decisions for the benefit of both myself and the wider society. JAMES HARDIE The history of asbestos in Australia and around the world is a history of cover up with companies choosing to ignore the dangers for as long as possible. Asbestos causes significant health problems, most notably lung cancer and mesothelioma, a type of cancer that affects the lining of the heart and lungs. Exposure to the fibres over a prolonged period – such as in the workplace – increases health risks significantly. The mining process was just the first stage of damaging contact with asbestos. The mineral was then manufactured into the myriad materials that helped build the houses and workplaces of post-war Australia. So with the first wave of asbestos-related diseases washing through the mining workforce, a second wave struck...
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...University Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia Free Author & Citation Info | Friends PDF Preview | InPho Search | PhilPapers Bibliography Kant and Hume on Morality First published Wed Mar 26, 2008; substantive revision Sun Aug 12, 2012 The ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is often contrasted with that of David Hume (1711–1776). Hume's method of moral philosophy is experimental and empirical; Kant emphasizes the necessity of grounding morality in a priori principles. Hume says that reason is properly a “slave to the passions,” while Kant bases morality in his conception of a reason that is practical in itself. Hume identifies such feelings as benevolence and generosity as proper moral motivations; Kant sees the motive of duty—a motive that Hume usually views as a second best or fall back motive—as uniquely expressing an agent's commitment to morality and thus as conveying a special moral worth to actions. Although there are many points at which Kant's and Hume's ethics stand in opposition to each other, there are also important connections between the two. Kant shared some important assumptions about morality and motivation with Hume, and had, early in his career, been attracted to and influenced by the sentimentalism of Hume and other British moralists. The aim of this essay is not to compare Hume and Kant on all matters ethical. Instead, we examine...
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