Weekly class description

Week1 & 2
Chapter 1, "Basic Principles," introduces you to the main focus of the textbook as a whole: to discuss the nature of ethical principles in general and how they apply to the ethical problems encountered in business. It then presents you with four preliminary topics to prepare you to analyze business-related moral issues.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Understand the general nature of business ethics.
2. Know the stages of moral development and the principles of moral reasoning.
3. Recognize the legitimacy of business ethics.
4. Define and discuss the different types and levels of moral responsibility.

Week 3 & 4
Chapter 2, "Ethical Principles in Business," presents you with the categories of moral judgments. It describes each approach, paying special attention to utilitarianism, Kant's categorical imperative, libertarianism, the theories of John Rawls and Carol Gilligan, and the ethics of virtue. After identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, the chapter explains how each approach can be used to illuminate the ethical choices facing businesses.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Understand the basic tenets and methodologies of utilitarianism, both its traditional (act) and its revised (rule) versions.
2. Describe the difficulties inherent in the utilitarian approach to ethics.
3. Describe and apply both formulations of Kant's categorical imperative.
4. Define the libertarian approach to ethics.
5. Show how considerations of justice and fairness enter into ethical considerations.
6. Understand how the ethics of care and the ethics of virtue respond to and modify other ethical positions.

Week 5 & 6
Chapter 3, "The Business System," discusses the morality of the market system as a whole. It examines how market systems are justified, and explains the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various systems currently in use. There are two basic viewpoints: one says that the business system should be planned; the other that it should be a free market system. After examining the arguments for and against free markets and government regulation, the chapter discusses the possibility of a hybrid mixed economy system.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Understand the basic arguments for and against free markets and central planning.
2. Recognize how these arguments are based upon ideology.
3. Explain how John Locke and Adam Smith make the case for free markets.
4. Understand the major criticisms of these free market theories, especially those of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx.
5. Explain how social Darwinism is connected to the free market economy.
6. Understand the effect of new technologies on free market assumptions about property rights.

Week 7 & 8
Chapter 4, "Ethics in the Marketplace," examines the ethics of anticompetitive practices. It discusses the moral values that market competition is meant to foster; then, it looks at the effects of various anticompetitive practices, such as price fixing and monopolizing, on these values. Since free markets are justified because they (in theory) allocate resources in ways that are just, such practices are not just unfair: they undermine the moral foundation of the free market system.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Define and give examples of the three degrees of market competition: perfect competition, pure monopoly, and oligopoly.
2. Identify the ethical issues raised by each type of competition.
3. Explain the principle of diminishing marginal utility and the principle of increasing marginal costs.
4. Show how these principles explain how markets reach the point of equilibrium (or the equilibrium price).
5. Explain the ethical justification for perfectly competitive markets.
6. Explain why other, less competitive markets are consequently less just.
7. Identify the most common forms of unethical market practices.
8. Describe the three stances towards monopolistic practices.

Week 9: Mid-Exam

Week 10
Chapter 5, "Ethics and the Environment," presents a number of concerns raised by the effects that business has upon the natural environment, focusing specifically upon pollution and resource depletion. As modern industry has become increasingly successful at providing us with material goods, it has also become an unparalleled threat to the natural world upon which all life depends.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Understand the extent of environmental damage produced by present—and projected—industrial technology.
2. Evaluate how large a threat industry poses to human and nonhuman welfare.
3. Identify what values, if any, must be changed to forestall industrial damage.
4. Discuss how to decide who should pay for environmental damage, and how to evaluate its extent.
5. Estimate how long our natural resources will last, and decide what obligations we have to future generations.
6. Evaluate the ethical choices involved in continued economic growth.

Week 11 & 12
Chapter 6, "The Ethics of Consumer Production and Marketing," discusses the ethical issues raised by product quality and advertising. Though some theorists claim that the market, left to its own devices, provides consumer protection, most others maintain that manufacturers have further duties to consumers. In addition to examining the nature of these duties, the chapter also looks at the moral issues raised by advertising.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Identify the characteristics of the three major theories of ethical duties of manufacturers: the contract view, the "due care" view, and the social costs view.
2. Explain why businesses have a duty to comply, disclose, and not misrepresent or coerce.
3. Understand how the duty to exercise due care extends to design, production, and information.
4. Explain the utilitarian basis of the social costs view, and identify the major arguments against it.
5. Discuss the ethical issues raised by advertising, such as its social effects and the creation of consumer desires.

Week 13 & 14
Chapter 7, "The Ethics of Job Discrimination," begins by examining the nature, history, and extent of discrimination in the workplace. After discussing how wrongful discrimination is unjustified by utility, rights, and justice arguments, it describes the most common discriminatory practices and examines the most extensive—and controversial—social method for dealing with wrongful discrimination so far: affirmative action.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Describe the various intentional and institutional aspects of wrongful discrimination in employment.
2. Explain how comparisons of average benefits, lowest income groups, and desirable occupations can demonstrate the extent of discrimination in an organization.
3. Identify the arguments against wrongful discrimination based on utility, rights, and justice.
4. Identify the most widely recognized discriminatory practices.
5. Understand the various features of sexual harassment.
6. Explain the arguments for and against affirmative action programs.
7. Discuss the pros and cons of comparable pay programs.

Week 15
Chapter 8, "The Individual in the Organization," introduces the ethical issues raised by the relationship between individuals and the business organizations in which they function. Individuals often experience business organizations as alienating, oppressive structures that can give rise to health problems, conflicts of interest, and dehumanizing experiences. After describing the traditional "rational" model of the business organization and its underlying "political" structure, the chapter ends by exploring a new model of the organization as a network of personal relationships focused on caring.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Describe the traditional rational model of business organization, showing how it creates reciprocal moral duties on the part of the employer and the employee.
2. Explain how conflicts of interest and trade secrets should be handled according to the rational model.
3. Discuss the issue of insider trading, giving the arguments for and against the practice.
4. Show how wages, working conditions, and job satisfaction are ethical issues.
5. Explain how business organizations are political in nature—and how political power can be used morally.
6. Understand how freedom of conscience and whistleblowing are related to employee duties within a business organization.
7. Explain the distinction between employment at will and right to due process.
8. Identify effective political tactics and explain how they can be ethically exercised.
9. Describe the benefits and pitfalls of the caring organization.

Week 16:
Final exam-Project presentation

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