Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading…
Transcript

Philosophical Approaches to Ethics

Justice Theories

Straw Men

Straw men approaches offer inappropriate guidelines for ethical decision making in a multinational enterprise

Justice theories focus on the attainment of a just distribution of economic goods and services

There are four common straw men approaches:

The Friedman doctrine suggests that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits, so long as the company stays within the rules of law

A just distribution is one that is considered fair and equitable

Philosophy

One theory of justice that is particularly important was proposed by John Rawls who argued that all economic goods and services should be distributed equally except when an unequal distribution would work to everyone’s advantage

The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline

Ethics

Moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity

According to Rawls, impartiality is guaranteed by the veil of ignorance (everyone is imagined to be ignorant of all his or her particular characteristics)

Philosophical Approaches To Ethics

There are several different approaches to business ethics

  • Some approaches deny the value of business ethics or apply the concept in an unsatisfactory way
  • Others are favored by moral philosophers and are the basis for current models of ethical behavior

Cultural Relativism argues that ethics are culturally determined and that firms should adopt the ethics of the cultures in which they operate, or in other words, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”

The Righteous Moralist approach claims that a multinational’s home country standards of ethics should be followed in foreign countries

Rights Theories

Outline

The Naïve Immoralist asserts that if a manager of a multinational sees that firms from other nations are not following ethical norms in a host nation, that manager should not either

Rights Theories recognize that human beings have fundamental rights and privileges which transcend national boundaries and cultures

  • Philosophy ?
  • Ethics ?
  • Straw Men
  • Friedman Doctrine
  • Cultural Relativism
  • Righteous Moralism
  • Naive Immoralism.
  • Utilitarian And Kantian Ethics
  • Rights Theories
  • Justice Theories
  • Rights theories establish a minimum level of morally acceptable behavior
  • Moral theorists argue that fundamental human rights form the basis for the moral compass that managers should navigate by when making decisions which have an ethical component

Justice Theories

When these conditions exist:

Utilitarian And Kantian Ethics

  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies the basic principles that should always be stick on to irrespective of the culture in which one is doing business
  • The declaration was prompted by the idea that some fundamental rights transcend national borders and cultures

Utilitarian approaches to ethics hold that the moral worth of actions or practices is determined by their consequences

  • Actions are desirable if they lead to the best possible balance of good consequences over bad consequences
  • Problems with utilitarianism include measuring the benefits, costs, and risks of an action, and the fact that the approach fails to consider justice

  • Each person is allowable the maximum amount of basic freedom well-matched with a similar freedom for others
  • Once equal basic freedom is assured, inequality in basic goods social goods are to be allowed only if they benefit everyone

Kantian ethics are based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant who argued that people should be treated as ends and never purely as means to the ends of others

Shaheer Hassan Ashraf

Reg#013

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi