Essay Instructions: Directions- Read the 4 cases. In each of the 4 cases make and justify a moral decision whether the social costs and benefits (utilitarianism) are significant enough to justify the infringements on rights. (2 pages) Separate about a page a case, it doesn?t have to all be one flowing paper, divide it up into 4 divisions where you talk about the issues for that particular case
**You may want to define Utilitarianism and Rights
****Cases****
Case 1- Dating at Wal-Mart
The company?s position is crystal-clear: ?Wal-Mart strongly believes and supports the ?family unit.?? For this reason, the handbook that all newly hired employees must read and sign stipulates, ?A dating relationship between a married associate with another associate is prohibited.? This policy was designed in part to maintain businesslike relations among employees and to avoid turmoil that extramarital affairs can cause in the workplace. An added, and perhaps not unintended, benefit of the policy is to reinforce the wholesome, down-home image that Wal-Mart carefully fosters. The policy was challenged, however, when the manager of a Wal-Mart store in Johnstown, New York, discovered that two sales associates-one a twenty-year-old single man and the other a twenty-three-year old woman who was married but separated from her husband-were dating. The romantic tie between the two came to the manager?s attention when the woman was swerved with custody papers at the store. The manager immediately fired them both. The woman could not remember reading the no-dating rule in the handbook but expressed her disagreement nonetheless. ?I felt it was my personal life,? she said.
Case 2- Is email private?
A reporter in the Moscow bureau of the Los Angeles Times guessed the passwords of his colleagues and read their email, thereby gaining an advantage in office politics. He was disciplined. Two women who worked for Nissan, training dealers in the use of the company?s email system. Were fired after their supervisor overrode the passwords and read exchanges with the dealers they were training. The messages contained some sexually suggestive banter along with comments by the women disparaging the supervisor?s own sexual prowess. Did the reporter of the supervisor do anything unethical? A letter sent to a colleague by U.S. mail would be considered private, as would (perhaps) a sealed envelope delivered through a company?s own mail system. Email messages are accessible only with a password known to the user, so they are also like letters stored in a locked desk drawer. The desk may belong to the company but not the contents. On the other hand, email messages are also like notes posted on a company-owned bulletin board, because the technology is provided to the employee. Employers claim a right to monitor employee?s messages to ensure that the system is not being misuse. Company computers have been used to arrange durg dels, to operate office betting pools, and to engage in racial and sexual harassment. Some privacy experts contened that employers have a right to read employee?s email if they announce the policy in advance; others believe that reading electronic messages is always wrong, even if employees are put on notice.
Case 3- Video Surveillance
In September 1997, an employee at the Consolidated Freightways truck terminal in Riverside County, California, noticed that the mirror above a sink in the men?s rest room was askew. When he went to adjust it, he came across a hidden video camera. A check by the local sheriffs office, which was called to investigate, uncovered hidden cameras in two of nine rest rooms and several recorded videotapes. A company representative explained that the cameras were aimed only at areas where drug dealing was suspected of taking place and that they were focused ?nowhere near the urinals or the stall area.? California state law forbids surveillance in areas where people have a ?reasonable expectation? of privacy, and many of the 600 employees in the facility were outraged by the company?s tactics. The company argued that it has a responsibility to protect the public, as well as its own employees and customers? freight, against the dangers of drug use by drivers. A suspected love tryst was the reason given for the installation of a video camera in a women?s locker room at an Amoco chemical laboratory in Illinois.4S In response to complaints that a male supervisor and female worker were leaving their workstations to be together in the locker room, Amoco managers installed a hidden camera in the ceiling, trained on the door. After the existence of the camera was discovered, eight female employees, who would have been observed entering and leaving the locker room to change clothes, filed a lawsuit charging an invasion of privacy. The locker room was also used occasionally by visitors who needed to change clothes, and a female electrician, who was not an employee but who worked at the Laboratory during the period of the surveillance, joined the women?s suit.
Case 4-Ford Meter Box
In 1989, the Ford Meter Box Company adopted a policy of hiring only nonsmokers. Smoking had already been banned on the job by the Wabash, Indiana, manufacturer, but employees hired prior to the date of the policy?s adoption were permitted to continue smoking away from the plant on their own time. However, newly hired employees were told that they could not smoke at all?anyplace, anytime. Janice Bone, a part-time clerk and a smoker, refrained from smoking at work and was unaffected by the new hiring policy. .. until she applied for a vacant full- time position. The job change would make her a ?new hire,? subject to the policy. To get the job she would have to give up smoking entirely. Janice Bone agreed to quit and got the job, but a drug test, routinely administered to all new employees after six weeks of service, revealed the presence of nicotine. Subsequently, Ford Meter Box terminated her employment.
Ford Meter Box is not alone in adopting a policy to hire only nonsmokers. An estimated 20 percent of employers give some preference to nonsmoking applicants, 49 and many provide some inducements for employees to stop smoking or impose penalties on those who continue to smoke. Turner Broadcasting is perhaps the best-known company that refuses to hire smokers, although previously hired smokers are permitted to smoke at work in designated areas. Employers? interest in their employees? smoking habits stem largely from the extra Cost that smoking imposes. A study by Texas Instruments, Inc., found that the cost of a smoker?s health care was 50 percent greater than that of a nonsmoker, and a study by Du Pont in the late 1980s showed that smokers cost the company an additional $960 each in medical bills and days lost from work. Instead of forbidding employees to smoke, however, Texas Instruments charges employees an extra $10 a month in their health insurance premiums for each family member, including the employee, who smokes.
Critics of smoking bans and extra charges worry that employers will soon turn their attention to other unhealthy lifestyles and attempt to regulate employees? weight or alcohol consumption and dangerous hobbies, such as mountain climbing or bungee jumping. Employers? options are being limited, however, by state laws that protect employees in their pursuit of legal, off-duty activities. The new laws have been promoted by an unusual alliance between the tobacco industry lobby and the American Civil Liberties Union, each of which claims to be protecting employees? privacy and ?right to choose.?
****NOTES****
Utilitarianism = considering consequences for all
Rights = treat all people as ends and never as a means only
Corporate Social Responsibility
The Classical Model of Corporate Social Responsibility
The role of business management is to maximize profits within the law
Milton Freidman
Ethical foundation based on utilitarianism and individual rights to freedom and property (believes that this maximizes happiness because consumers get what they want; and business is private property
Business People aren?t trained to be making these kinds of ethical moral decisions that?s why they?re now giving business classes an ethics course, because big businesses have a large role in society
Critical Assessment of the Classical Model
The Utilitarian Defense- Is the free market an adequate means to our ends, and are the ends ethically appropriate
Market Failure:Externalities and public goods sometimes need regulation (pollution and fishing are examples)
Law as an answer: first generation problem; inappropriate influence; business shapes public opinion
The Rights Defense
Property rights are not absolute (example zoning laws for real estate)
Corporate property rights differ from personal property. Owners vs. Investors. Less owners than customers.
Some peoples rights trump others
Social Contract Theory
Corporate Rights and responsibilities can be inferred from the terms and conditions of an imaginary contract between business and society
A heuristic device: Are corporations best understood on a model of private property managed on behalf of individual owners(the classical model) or as a social creation organized to serve a variety of social goals(the social contract model)?
Stakeholder Theory
The business should be managed for the benefit of stakeholders
Stakeholder:
Any group who are vital to the survival and success of the corporation
Any group or individual who can affect or be affected by a corporation
*This is both Rights and Utilitarian based
*This doesn?t say you have to listen to everybody just at least listen to them to see if you can make some happy
