Who You Vote for? Mehltretter Drury. NET - Tony Stubblebine. Edition - Richard P. Michael Duncan. Guide - Project Management Institute. Wagoner Jr. Author : Joanne B. Business involves risk-taking, whether decisions are at the strategic, managerial, or operational level. Designed to be read by both undergraduates and postgraduates, this book is a primer on ethics in business. It is also relevant to ethics courses that are now part of many legal, accountancy and other professional examinations.
The book is not about moral philosophy, nor does it prescribe appropriate standards of behaviour or recommend economic, legal or political solutions. Rather it enables readers to recognize ethical issues in business, to respond appropriately, and to embed ethics in business processes. The book not only considers what business ethics are, and why they are important, but offers practical approaches on how to develop a successful corporate ethics culture.
This project has made it possible to produce texts and fundamental frameworks for the development of courses in professional ethics, business ethics, egineering ethics and medical ethics. In this volume on business ethics we try to present a coherent vision which takes into account the tension between three levels of analysis. The first chapter, written by Joseph Lozano, focuses on the interaction between companies and society, with special attention to their social responsibility.
In the second chapter Jef Van Gerwen treats the meso-level of analysis: of companies as organizations which are in a process of becoming institutions. In this text he gives a survey of different ways of approaching corporate ethics: social contract theory, stakeholder model, corporate governance ethics, the cognitive-developmental approach, the Socratic method and the narrative method, with a special attention to discernment and the problem of tragic choices. In the first part of the third chapter, which is a transition from the meso to the micro level, Thomas Brytting describes how companies can function as moral spaces in which individuals can acquire moral competence.
According to him companies function as moral spaces in which individuals develop the dialogical ability to perceive, reflect and act on moral issues with preserved integrity. In the second part Johan Verstraeten analyzes business ethics on the individual level. He demonstrates that it is not only important to make concrete moral decisions, but also to integrate moral choices in a meaningful life.
Score: 5. Stanwick and Sarah D. Stanwick, prepares readers for the ethical dilemmas they may face in their chosen careers by providing broad, comprehensive coverage of business ethics from a global perspective. An introduction defines business ethics and describes the tools of business ethics.
Readers will also find biographical sketches, a detailed examination of the major issues, ethical codes, a directory of business organizations and associations, and a selection of print and nonprint resources, including websites.
By Laura P. Hartman, Joseph R. DesJardins, Chris MacDonald. She is also cofounded an online micro-de… Read More. Do you believe different purchasing decisions by consumers could really make a difference? Which of the three models of CSR is most persuasive to you and why? Which do you believe is most prevalent among companies that engage in CSR efforts? This chapter has asked in several ways whether the social responsibility of the compa- nies you patronize has ever made any difference to your purchasing decisions.
Will it make any difference in the future as a result of what you have learned? Consider your last three largest purchases. Are they more or less than what you expected? Enron also gave money to local organizations such as the ballet and national organizations based in Houston such as United Way. If you were on the jury, would any of this information be relevant to your decision about Mr. If your jury had determined that Mr. Lay was guilty, would any of this information be relevant to your decision about the sen- tence you would then impose?
Defend your decision from an ethical perspective. Companies should only pursue charitable endeavors with the underlying intention of making money.
What the hell have we taken away from society by being a successful company that employs people? Supermodel Kate Moss appeared in photos in a number of tabloid magazines and else- where using illegal drugs.
Moss issued a statement that she had checked herself into a rehabilitation center for assistance with her drug use. Assume that you are the market- ing vice president for a major global fashion label that is a client of Ms. Moss at the time of these events. Use the ethical decision-making process to evaluate how to respond to the situation.
What is your decision on what to do? What kind of organization would you like to work for? What would be the best? What would be the most realistic? Think about its structure, physical environment, lines of communication, treatment of employees, recruitment and promotion practices, policies towards the community, and so on. Take another look at the quote earlier in this chapter by Paul Hawken. Would you identify Mr. Hawken as an individual interested in CSR or personal social responsibility? Which model of CSR would you suggest that Mr.
Hawken supports? For years, the caretakers of the athletes have also been suspected as the doping pushers. Or, if you do not agree with an argument for its responsibility to do good, could you instead make an economic argument in favor of intervention? Key Terms After reading this chapter, you should have a clear understanding of the following Key Terms. The page numbers refer to the point at which they were discussed in the chapter. Kenneth R. Church, A. Cade, and A. Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. Makower, Beyond the Bottom Line, p. Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Dept. Quoted in C. Quarterly 4, no. Lewin and J. Makower, Beyond the Bottam Line, pp. London: Institute of Business Ethics, , p.
Vogl, p. Busi- nessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. In the debate that follows, Mackey lays out his personal vision of the social responsibil- ity of business. Friedman responds, as does T. Rodgers, the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and the chief spokesman of what might be called the tough love school of laissez faire. Reason offers this exchange as the starting point of a discussion that should be intensely important to all devotees of free minds and free markets.
I strongly disagree. I believe I know something about creating shareholder value. But we have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making share- holder value the primary purpose of our business.
At Whole Foods, we measure our success by how much value we can create for all six of our most important stakeholders: customers, team members employees , investors, vendors, communities, and the environment. There is, of course, no magical formula to calculate how much value each stakeholder should receive from the company. It is a dynamic process that evolves with the competi- tive marketplace. It is the function of company leadership to develop solutions that continually work for the common good.
Many thinking people will readily accept my arguments that caring about customers and employees is good business. But they might draw the line at believing a company has any responsibility to its community and environment. This position sounds reasonable. In my view, the argument is not wrong so much as it is too narrow. While our stores select worthwhile organizations to support, they also tend to focus on groups that have large membership lists, which are con- tacted and encouraged to shop our store that day to support the organization.
This usually brings hundreds of new or lapsed customers into our stores, many of whom then become regular shoppers. It is the entrepreneurs who create a company, who bring all the factors of production together and coordinate it into viable business.
It is the entrepreneurs who set the company strategy and who negotiate the terms of trade with all of the voluntarily cooperating stake- holders—including the investors. Our policy has therefore been in place for over 20 years, and it predates our IPO by seven years. All seven of the private investors at the time we created the policy voted for it when they served on our board of directors.
In addition, in almost 14 years as a publicly traded com- pany, almost no investors have ever raised objections to the policy. The shareholders of a public company own their stock voluntarily. A number of our company policies have been changed over the years through successful shareholder resolutions.
Another objection to the Whole Foods philosophy is where to draw the line. It is an arbitrary percentage that the co-founders of the company decided was a reasonable amount and which was approved by the owners of the company at the time we made the decision.
Corporate philanthropy is a good thing, but it requires the legitimacy of investor approval. For that, you should turn to one of the fathers of free-market economics, Adam Smith.
It also includes sympathy, empathy, friendship, love, and the desire for social approval. The word "ethics" in English refers to several things.
It can refer to philosophical ethics or moral philosophy—a project that attempts to use reason in order to answer various kinds of ethical questions. As the English philosopher Bernard Williams writes, attempting to explain moral philosophy: "What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive.
As bioethicist Larry Churchill has written: "Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity. For example: "Joe has strange ethics.
A meta-ethical question is abstract and relates to a wide range of more specific practical questions. For example, "Is it ever possible to have secure knowledge of what is right and wrong? Meta-ethics has always accompanied philosophical ethics. For example, Aristotle implies that less precise knowledge is possible in ethics than in other spheres of inquiry, and he regards ethical knowledge as depending upon habit and acculturation in a way that makes it distinctive from other kinds of knowledge.
Meta-ethics is also important in G. Moore's Principia Ethica from In it he first wrote about what he called the naturalistic fallacy. Moore was seen to reject naturalism in ethics, in his Open Question Argument.
This made thinkers look again at second order questions about ethics. Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had put forward a similar view on the difference between facts and values. Studies of how we know in ethics divide into cognitivism and non- cognitivism; this is similar to the contrast between descriptivists and non-descriptivists. Non- cognitivism is the claim that when we judge something as right or wrong, this is neither true nor false. We may for example be only expressing our emotional feelings about these things.
The ontology of ethics is about value-bearing things or properties, i. Non-descriptivists and non- cognitivists believe that ethics does not need a specific ontology, since ethical propositions do not refer. This is known as an anti-realist position. Realists on the other hand must explain what kind of entities, properties or states are relevant for ethics, how they have value, and why they guide and motivate our actions.
Normative ethics Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because it examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts.
Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as the latter is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs. To put it another way, descriptive ethics would be concerned with determining what proportion of people believe that killing is always wrong, while normative ethics is concerned with whether it is correct to hold such a belief.
However, on certain versions of the meta-ethical view called moral realism, moral facts are both descriptive and prescriptive at the same time. Traditionally, normative ethics also known as moral theory was the study of what makes actions right and wrong. These theories offered an overarching moral principle one could appeal to in resolving difficult moral decisions. At the turn of the 20th century, moral theories became more complex and are no longer concerned solely with rightness and wrongness, but are interested in many different kinds of moral status.
During the middle of the century, the study of normative ethics declined as meta-ethics grew in prominence. This focus on meta-ethics was in part caused by an intense linguistic focus in analytic philosophy and by the popularity of logical positivism.
In John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, noteworthy in its pursuit of moral arguments and eschewing of meta-ethics. This publication set the trend for renewed interest in normative ethics. Virtue ethics Virtue ethics describes the character of a moral agent as a driving force for ethical behavior, and is used to describe the ethics of Socrates, Aristotle, and other early Greek philosophers. Socrates — BC was one of the first Greek philosophers to encourage both scholars and the common citizen to turn their attention from the outside world to the condition of humankind.
In this view, knowledge bearing on human life was placed highest, while all other knowledge were secondary. Self-knowledge was considered necessary for success and inherently an essential good. A self-aware person will act completely within his capabilities to his pinnacle, while an ignorant person will flounder and encounter difficulty.
To Socrates, a person must become aware of every fact and its context relevant to his existence, if he wishes to attain self-knowledge. He posited that people will naturally do what is good, if they know what is right. Evil or bad actions are the result of ignorance.
If a criminal was truly aware of the intellectual and spiritual consequences of his actions, he would neither commit nor even consider committing those actions. Any person who knows what is truly right will automatically do it, according to Socrates. While he correlated knowledge with virtue, he similarly equated virtue with joy. The truly wise man will know what is right, do what is good, and therefore be happy. Aristotle — BC posited an ethical system that may be termed "self-realizationism.
At birth, a baby is not a person, but a potential person. To become a "real" person, the child's inherent potential must be realized. Unhappiness and frustration are caused by the unrealized potential of a person, leading to failed goals and a poor life. Aristotle said, "Nature does nothing in vain. Happiness was held to be the ultimate goal. All other things, such as civic life or wealth, are merely means to the end. Self- realization, the awareness of one's nature and the development of one's talents, is the surest path to happiness.
Physical nature can be assuaged through exercise and care, emotional nature through indulgence of instinct and urges, and mental through human reason and developed potential. Rational development was considered the most important, as essential to philosophical self-awareness and as uniquely human. Moderation was encouraged, with the extremes seen as degraded and immoral.
For example, courage is the moderate virtue between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness. This is regarded as difficult, as virtue denotes doing the right thing, to the right person, at the right time, to the proper extent, in the correct fashion, for the right reason. Stoicism The Stoic philosopher Epictetus posited that the greatest good was contentment and serenity.
Peace of mind, or Apatheia, was of the highest value; self-mastery over one's desires and emotions leads to spiritual peace. The "unconquerable will" is central to this philosophy. The individual's will should be independent and inviolate. Allowing a person to disturb the mental equilibrium is in essence offering yourself in slavery.
If a person is free to anger you at will, you have no control over your internal world, and therefore no freedom. Freedom from material attachments is also necessary. If a thing breaks, the person should not be upset, but realize it was a thing that could break. Similarly, if someone should die, those close to them should hold to their serenity because the loved one was made of flesh and blood destined to death.
Stoic philosophy says to accept things that cannot be changed, resigning oneself to existence and enduring in a rational fashion. Death is not feared. People do not "lose" their life, but instead "return", for they are returning to God who initially gave what the person is as a person. Epictetus said difficult problems in life should not be avoided, but rather embraced. They are spiritual exercises needed for the health of the spirit, just as physical exercise is required for the health of the body.
He also stated that sex and sexual desire are to be avoided as the greatest threat to the integrity and equilibrium of a man's mind. Abstinence is highly desirable. Epictetus said remaining abstinent in the face of temptation was a victory for which a man could be proud. Contemporary virtue ethics Modern virtue ethics was popularized during the late 20th century in large part as a response to G.
Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy". Anscombe argues that consequentialist and deontological ethics are only feasible as universal theories if the two schools ground themselves in divine law. As a deeply devoted Christian herself, Anscombe proposed that either those who do not give ethical credence to notions of divine law take up virtue ethics, which does not necessitate universal laws as agents themselves are investigated for virtue or vice and held up to "universal standards," or that those who wish to be utilitarian or consequentialist ground their theories in religious conviction.
Alasdair MacIntyre, who wrote the book After Virtue, was a key contributor and proponent of modern virtue ethics, although MacIntyre supports a relativistic account of virtue based on cultural norms, not objective standards. Martha Nussbaum, a contemporary virtue ethicist, objects to MacIntyre's relativism, among that of others, and responds to relativist objections to form an objective account in her work "Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach. There are several schools of Hedonist thought ranging from those advocating the indulgence of even momentary desires to those teaching a pursuit of spiritual bliss.
In their consideration of consequences, they range from those advocating self-gratification regardless of the pain and expense to others, to those stating that the most ethical pursuit maximizes pleasure and happiness for the most people. Cyrenaic hedonism Founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, Cyrenaics supported immediate gratification or pleasure. There was little to no concern with the future, the present dominating in the pursuit for immediate pleasure.
Cyrenaic hedonism encouraged the pursuit of enjoyment and indulgence without hesitation, believing pleasure to be the only good. Epicureanism Epicurean ethics is a hedonist form of virtue ethics. Epicurus "presented a sustained argument that pleasure, correctly understood, will coincide with virtue".
He rejected the extremism of the Cyrenaics, believing some pleasures and indulgences to be detrimental to human beings. Epicureans observed that indiscriminate indulgence sometimes resulted in negative consequences.
Some experiences were therefore rejected out of hand, and some unpleasant experiences endured in the present to ensure a better life in the future. To Epicurus the summum bonum, or greatest good, was prudence, exercised through moderation and caution. Excessive indulgence can be destructive to pleasure and can even lead to pain. For example, eating one food too often will cause a person to lose taste for it. Eating too much food at once will lead to discomfort and ill-health.
Pain and fear were to be avoided. Living was essentially good, barring pain and illness. Death was not to be feared. Fear was considered the source of most unhappiness.
Conquering the fear of death would naturally lead to a happier life. Epicurus reasoned if there was an afterlife and immortality, the fear of death was irrational. If there was no life after death, then the person would not be alive to suffer, fear or worry; he would be non- existent in death. It is irrational to fret over circumstances that do not exist, such as one's state in death in the absence of an afterlife.
State consequentialism State consequentialism, also known as Mohist consequentialism, is an ethical theory that evaluates the moral worth of an action based on how much it contributes to the basic goods of a state. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Mohist consequentialism, dating back to the 5th century BC, as "a remarkably sophisticated version based on a plurality of intrinsic goods taken as constitutive of human welfare.
During Mozi's era, war and famines were common, and population growth was seen as a moral necessity for a harmonious society. The "material wealth" of Mohist consequentialism refers to basic needs like shelter and clothing, and the "order" of Mohist consequentialism refers to Mozi's stance against warfare and violence, which he viewed as pointless and a threat to social stability.
Stanford sinologist David Shepherd Nivison, in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, writes that the moral goods of Mohism "are interrelated: more basic wealth, then more reproduction; more people, then more production and wealth The importance of outcomes that are good for the community outweigh the importance of individual pleasure and pain.
Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right action is one that produces a good outcome, or consequence. This view is often expressed as the aphorism "The ends justify the means". The term "consequentialism" was coined by G. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in , to describe what she saw as the central error of certain moral theories, such as those propounded by Mill and Sidgwick.
The defining feature of consequentialist moral theories is the weight given to the consequences in evaluating the rightness and wrongness of actions. In consequentialist theories, the consequences of an action or rule generally outweigh other considerations. Apart from this basic outline, there is little else that can be unequivocally said about consequentialism as such. One way to divide various consequentialisms is by the types of consequences that are taken to matter most, that is, which consequences count as good states of affairs.
According to utilitarianism, a good action is one that results in an increase in a positive effect, and the best action is one that results in that effect for the greatest number. Closely related is eudaimonic consequentialism, according to which a full, flourishing life, which may or may not be the same as enjoying a great deal of pleasure, is the ultimate aim.
Similarly, one might adopt an aesthetic consequentialism, in which the ultimate aim is to produce beauty.
However, one might fix on non-psychological goods as the relevant effect. Thus, one might pursue an increase in material equality or political liberty instead of something like the more ephemeral "pleasure". Other theories adopt a package of several goods, all to be promoted equally. Whether a particular consequentialist theory focuses on a single good or many, conflicts and tensions between different good states of affairs are to be expected and must be adjudicated.
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are influential proponents of this school of thought. In A Fragment on Government Bentham says 'it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong' and describes this as a fundamental axiom. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation he talks of 'the principle of utility' but later prefers "the greatest happiness principle".
Utilitarianism is the paradigmatic example of a consequentialist moral theory. This form of utilitarianism holds that what matters is the aggregate positive effect of everyone and not only of any one person. John Stuart Mill, in his exposition of utilitarianism, proposed a hierarchy of pleasures, meaning that the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure is more highly valued than the pursuit of other pleasures. Other noteworthy proponents of utilitarianism are neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of, amongst other works, Practical Ethics.
There are two types of utilitarianism, act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. In act utilitarianism the principle of utility is applied directly to each alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act is then defined as the one which brings about the best results or the least amount of bad results.
In rule utilitarianism the principle of utility is used to determine the validity of rules of conduct moral principles. A rule like promise-keeping is established by looking at the consequences of a world in which people broke promises at will and a world in which promises were binding. Right and wrong are then defined as following or breaking those rules. This is in contrast to consequentialism, in which rightness is based on the consequences of an act, and not the act by itself.
In deontology, an act may be considered right even if the act produces a bad consequence, if it follows the rule that "one should do unto others as they would have done unto them", and even if the person who does the act lacks virtue and had a bad intention in doing the act.
According to deontology, we have a duty to act in a way that does those things that are inherently good as acts "truth-telling" for example , or follow an objectively obligatory rule as in rule utilitarianism.
For deontologists, the ends or consequences of our actions are not important in and of themselves, and our intentions are not important in and of themselves. Immanuel Kant's theory of ethics is considered deontological for several different reasons. First, Kant argues that to act in the morally right way, people must act from duty deon. Second, Kant argued that it was not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but the motives maxime of the person who carries out the action.
Something is 'good in itself' when it is intrinsically good, and 'good without qualification' when the addition of that thing never makes a situation ethically worse. Kant then argues that those things that are usually thought to be good, such as intelligence, perseverance and pleasure, fail to be either intrinsically good or good without qualification.
Pleasure, for example, appears to not be good without qualification, because when people take pleasure in watching someone suffer, they make the situation ethically worse.
0コメント