“The Case of the Sole Remaining Supplier” demonstrates one of the many instances where individuals must contemplate their moral standards in reflective issues. In the situation disclosed in the case, readers are presented with a layout of facts where they are on the board of directors for a company that makes transistors and supplies them to other companies, one of which includes a business where the transistors are used to make pacemakers. Your company has now become the only remaining supplier of transistors since other companies would not sell to them. Because a company that sells malfunctioning products are held accountable for consequences caused by defects, risk is at hand.
Ethical affairs, less clearcut than business issues, consist of the concerns of your contractee. If your company halts supply of transistors to the Pacemaker company, they will have no other source of transistor inventory. Given these details, moral issues arise with your company being the origin of the involuntary shutdown of pacemaker manufacturing, depriving heart patients of their sole option of heart rate normalcy. Essentially, if you terminate your contract with the Pacemaker company, heart patients in need of the pacemaker will die.
While business interests simply commend individuals to think economically efficient, morality often comes into play under circumstances as such, validating the disparities between a company’s principles as an object and staff virtues as human beings. With the combination of performance and righteousness, thinking ethically becomes a significant tactic in drawing a decision. Markkula Center for Applied Ethics provides a framework of five approaches that can be utilized in ethical decision making. There is the Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness/Justice, Common-Good, and Virtue Approach, all of which provide different moral perspectives and alternatives to