DISCUSSIONSMinimum of 250 per question1. “Unethical
Situations in the Workplace” Please respond to the following:
Recall
a time when you experienced an unethical situation at a work place. What events
led up to this situation? Do you think it could have been avoided? Did the
company take the right action?2. “Hacking
into Harvard” Please respond to the following:
Read Case
2.1: Hacking into Harvard, ( See attachment. As applicants began to defend themselves against the penalties handed
out by the business schools, they appealed to both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist
criteria to support their actions. Some responded by pointing out that their
intentions were never malicious, while others argued they did not think
checking their application statuses would cause any real harm. Review the case
study and analyze the actions of the students from a Kantian perspective.
Consider whether the actions taken by the hackers were permissible according
the standard of universal acceptability.3. “Battling
Over Bottled Water” Please respond to the following:
Read Case 3.2: Battling Over Bottled
Water, ( See attachment). Nestlé
holds a 99-year lease for the land that the Sanctuary Spring sits on. While
lease-holders are generally understood to be able to make full use of their
land, when public resources are involved, they are limited to “reasonable
uses.” Review the case study and formulate an argument either supporting or
challenging this distinction. Support your reasoning by addressing key ways in
which benefits and burdens are being distributed between Nestlé and the
community in this case.
bus309_case_study_2.1_discussion.pdf
bus309_case_study_3.2_discussion.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
chapter two Normative Theories of Ethics 71
•
the deathbed-promise example (pp. 50–51)
•
•
business as combining self-interest and social good
(or egoism and utilitarianism) (pp. 52–53)
how Ross’s theory differs from utilitarianism and from
Kant’s categorical imperative (p. 61)
•
four important characteristics of human rights (p. 63)
•
the difference between negative and positive rights (p. 63)
•
how rule utilitarianism differs from act utilitarianism
(p. 66)
•
the convenience store owner and acting from a sense of
duty (p. 54)
•
Martin’s promise as an illustration of the categorical
imperative (p. 55)
•
•
hypothetical imperatives vs. the categorical imperative
(p. 56)
the optimal moral code and the analogy with traffic rules
(p. 67)
•
two objections to rule utilitarianism (p. 67)
•
two alternative formulations of the categorical imperative
(pp. 56–57)
•
two points drawn from Chapter 1 that can help moral
discussions (p. 68)
•
three features of Kant’s ethics in an organizational context
(pp. 57–58)
•
two-step procedure for morally evaluating actions and
choices (p. 70)
•
three critical inquiries of Kant’s ethics (pp. 58–59)
For Further Reflection
1. What value, if any, do you see in business students studying the basics of ethical theory?
2. Which normative theory or general approach to ethics do you find the most plausible or attractive, and why?
3. Can people who disagree about normative ethical theory still reach agreement on practical ethical questions in the business
world? If so, how?
C ASE 2 .1
Hacking into Harvard
Everyone who has ever applied for admission
to a selective college or who has been interviewed for a
highly desired job knows the feeling of waiting impatiently
to learn the result of one’s application. So it’s not hard to
identify with those applicants to some of the nation’s most
prestigious MBA programs who thought they had a chance
to get an early glimpse at whether their ambition was to be
fulfilled. While visiting a Businessweek Online message
board, they found instructions, posted by an anonymous
hacker, explaining how to find out what admission decision
the business schools had made in their case. Doing so wasn’t
hard. The universities in question—Harvard, Dartmouth,
Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford—used the same
application software from Apply Yourself, Inc. Essentially, all
72 part one moral philosophy and business
one had to do was change the very end of the applicantspecific URL to get to the supposedly restricted page containing the verdict on one’s application. In the nine hours it took
Apply Yourself programmers to patch the security flaw after
it was posted, curiosity got the better of about two hundred
applicants, who couldn’t resist the temptation to discover
whether they had been admitted.19
Some of them got only blank screens. But others learned
that they had been tentatively accepted or tentatively
rejected. What they didn’t count on, however, were two
things: first, that it wouldn’t take the business schools long to
learn what had happened and who had done it and, second,
that the schools in question were going to be very unhappy
about it. Harvard was perhaps the most outspoken. Kim B.
Clark, dean of the business school, said, “This behavior is
unethical at best—a serious breach of trust that cannot be
countered by rationalization.” In a similar vein, Steve Nelson,
the executive director of Harvard’s MBA program, stated,
“Hacking into a system in this manner is unethical and also
contrary to the behavior we expect of leaders we aspire to
develop.”
It didn’t take Harvard long to make up its mind what to do
about it. It rejected all 119 applicants who had attempted to
access the information. In an official statement, Dean Clark
wrote that the mission of the Harvard Business School “is to
educate principled leaders who make a difference in the
world. To achieve that, a person must have many skills and
qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound
judgment and a strong moral compass—an intuitive sense of
what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this
web site have failed to pass that test.” Carnegie Mellon and
MIT quickly followed suit. By rejecting the ethically challenged, said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT’s Sloan
School of Management, the schools are trying to “send a
message to society as a whole that we are attempting to
produce people that when they go out into the world, they will
behave ethically.”
Duke and Dartmouth, where only a handful of students
gained access to their files, said they would take a case-bycase approach and didn’t publicly announce their individualized determinations. But, given the competition for places in
their MBA programs, it’s a safe bet that few, if any, offending
applicants were sitting in classrooms the following semester.
Forty-two applicants attempted to learn their results early at
Stanford, which took a different tack. It invited the accused
hackers to explain themselves in writing. “In the best case,
what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; in
the worst case, a lack of integrity,” said Derrick Bolton,
Stanford’s director of MBA admissions. “One of the things we
try to teach at business schools is making good decisions
and taking responsibility for your actions.” Six weeks later,
however, the dean of Stanford Business School, Robert Joss,
reported, “None of those who gained unauthorized access
was able to explain his or her actions to our satisfaction.” He
added that he hoped the applicants “might learn from their
experience.”
Given the public’s concern over the wave of corporate
scandals in recent years and its growing interest in corporate
social responsibility, business writers and other media commentators warmly welcomed Harvard’s decisive response.
But soon there was some sniping at the decision by those
claiming that Harvard and the other business schools had
overreacted. Although 70 percent of Harvard’s MBA students
approved the decision, the undergraduate student newspaper, The Crimson, was skeptical. “HBS [Harvard Business
School] has scored a media victory with its hard-line stance,”
it said in an editorial. “Americans have been looking for a sign
from the business community, particularly its leading educational institutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS’s
false bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims in
angry hands.”
As some critics pointed out, Harvard’s stance overlooked
the possibility that the hacker might have been a spouse or a
parent who had access to the applicant’s password and personal identification number. In fact, one applicant said that
this had happened to him. His wife found the instructions at
Businessweek Online and tried to check on the success of
his application. “I’m really distraught over this,” he said. “My
wife is tearing her hair out.” To this, Harvard’s Dean Clark
responds, “We expect applicants to be personally responsible
for the access to the website, and for the identification and
passwords they receive.”
chapter two Normative Theories of Ethics 73
Critics also reject the idea that the offending applicants
were “hackers.” After all, they used their own personal identification and passwords to log on legitimately; all they did was
to modify the URL to go to a different page. They couldn’t
change anything in their files or view anyone else’s information. In fact, some critics blamed the business schools and
Apply Yourself more than they did the applicants. If those
pages were supposed to be restricted, then it shouldn’t have
been so easy to find one’s way to them.
In an interview, one of the Harvard applicants said that
although he now sees that what he did was wrong, he wasn’t
thinking about that at the time—he just followed the hacker’s
posted instructions out of curiosity. He didn’t consider what
he did to be “hacking,” because any novice could have done
the same thing. “I’m not an IT person by any stretch of the
imagination,” he said. “I’m not even a great typist.” He wrote
the university a letter of apology. “I admitted that I got curious
and had a lapse in judgment,” he said. “I pointed out that I
wasn’t trying to harm anyone and wasn’t trying to get an
advantage over anyone.” Another applicant said that he knew
he had made a poor judgment but he was offended by having
his ethics called into question. “I had no idea that they would
have considered this a big deal.” And some of those posting
messages at Businessweek Online and other MBA-related
sites believe the offending applicants should be applauded.
“Exploiting weaknesses is what good business is all about.
Why would they ding you?” wrote one anonymous poster.
Dean Schmalensee of MIT, however, defends Harvard and
MIT’s automatically rejecting everyone who peeked “because
it wasn’t an impulsive mistake.” “The instructions are reasonably elaborate,” he said. “You didn’t need a degree in computer science, but this clearly involved effort. You couldn’t do
this casually without knowing that you were doing something
wrong. We’ve always taken ethics seriously, and this is a serious matter.” To those applicants who say that they didn’t do
any harm, Schmalensee replies, “Is there nothing wrong with
going through files just because you can?”
To him and others, seeking unauthorized access to
restricted pages is as wrong as snooping through your
boss’s desk to see whether you’ve been recommended
for a raise. Some commentators, however, suggest there
may be a generation gap here. Students who grew up
with the Internet, they say, tend to see it as wide-open
territory and don’t view this level of web snooping as
indicating a character flaw.
Discussion Questions
1. Suppose that you had been one of the MBA applicants
who stumbled across an opportunity to learn your results
early. What would you have done, and why? Would you
have considered it a moral decision? If so, on what basis
would you have made it?
2. Assess the morality of what the curious applicants did
from the point of view of egoism, utilitarianism, Kant’s
ethics, Ross’s pluralism, and rule utilitarianism.
3. In your view, was it wrong for the MBA applicants to take
an unauthorized peek at their application files? Explain why
you consider what they did morally permissible or impermissible. What obligations, ideals, and effects should the
applicants have considered? Do you think, as some have
suggested, that there is a generation gap on this issue?
4. Did Harvard and MIT overreact, or was it necessary for
them to respond as they did in order to send a strong
message about the importance of ethics? If you were a
business-school admissions official, how would you have
handled this situation?
5. Assess the argument that the applicants who snooped
were just engaging in the type of bold and aggressive
behavior that makes for business success. In your view,
are these applicants likely to make good business leaders? What about the argument that it’s really the fault of
the universities for not having more secure procedures,
not the fault of the applicants who took advantage of
that fact?
6. One of the applicants admits that he used poor judgment but believes that his ethics should not be questioned. What do you think he means? If he exercised
poor judgment on a question of right and wrong, isn’t
that a matter of his ethics? Stanford’s Derrick Bolton
distinguishes between a lapse of judgment and a
lack of integrity. What do you see as the difference?
Based on this episode, what, if anything, can we say
about the ethics and the character of the curious
applicants?
chapter three Justice and Economic Distribution 109
5. Is it fair to the community if an individual refuses payment
and blocks a socially useful project? Putting legal issues
aside, are there situations in which it would be morally
permissible for government to seize private property for
the public good with less than full compensation or even
with no compensation at all?
6. Assess the concept of eminent domain, in general, and
the plight of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, in particular, from the point of view of the different theories
of justice discussed in this chapter. Is it possible to
square the government’s exercise of eminent domain
with a libertarian approach to justice?
C ASE 3.2
Battling over Bottled Water
Water is the lifeblood of the earth, but by
2025, according to the U.N., two-thirds of the world’s population could face chronic shortages of water. In fact, some
countries are already importing huge supertankers of freshwater from other countries. But one place that’s definitely not
short of water is the state of Michigan, which has 11,000
lakes and is surrounded by Lakes Michigan, Huron, Superior,
and Erie. So it came as a surprise to some that the Nestlé
company’s new Ice Mountain bottled-water plant in Mecosta
County, Michigan, dredged up so much controversy when it
began pumping water from a local spring.80
Nestlé’s willingness to invest $100 million to build a new
410,000-square-foot bottling plant in Mecosta reflects the
fact that bottled water is big business, with annual sales of $6
billion (up 35 percent since 1997). Many county residents, in
fact, are thrilled about Nestlé’s being there. The Ice Mountain
plant employs about a hundred people at $12 to $23 per
hour, significantly more than many local jobs pay. And the
company shells out hundreds of thousands of dollars in local
taxes. Township supervisor Maxine McClellan says, “This is
probably the best project we’ve ever brought into Mecosta
County.” She adds that she wants “a diversified economy
where our kids don’t have to move away to find jobs.”
The problem, as some local residents see it, is that
Nestlé has also built a 12-mile stainless steel pipeline from
the plant to Sanctuary Spring, which sits on an 850-acre
private deer-hunting ranch and is part of the headwaters of
the Little Muskegon River, which flows into the Muskegon
and then into Lake Michigan. The company started pumping 130 gallons of water every minute from the spring, with
plans to increase that to 400 gallons per minute, or about
262 million gallons a year. But whose water is Nestlé
pumping? That’s the question being asked by Michigan
Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC), a local Mecosta
group that has filed suit contesting Nestlé’s right to the
spring’s waters. Although the company has a ninety-nineyear lease on the land, MCWC contends that the water itself
is a public resource. As Jim Olson, MCWC’s lawyer, explains
it, under the doctrine of “reasonable use” the owners of a
stream can use its water for drinking, boating, swimming,
or anything else “as long as it’s in connection with their
land.” But, he argues, “this does not include the right to
110 part one moral philosophy and business
transport water to some distant land for [some other] use.
We’re arguing that the same is true with groundwater—
you can’t sever it from the estate.”
Michigan State Senator Ken Sikkema, who chaired a task
force on Michigan water issues, rejects that argument: “A
farmer pumps water out of the ground, waters potatoes, and
sends the potatoes to Illinois—there’s no real difference. The
water in those potatoes is gone.” This reasoning hasn’t
assuaged the fears of three American Indian tribes who have
joined the fray. Citing an 1836 treaty that protects their fishing and hunting rights in the Great Lakes region, they have
brought a federal lawsuit against Nestlé and the state of
Michigan to stop what they see as a massive water grab. “Our
fear,” says a spokesperson for the Little Traverse Bay Bands
of Odawa Indians, “is that the export could significantly and
permanently damage the fishery.”
However, David K. Ladd, head of the Office of Great
Lakes, argues that bottled water is a special case. Legally, he
contends, it’s a “food,” regulated by the Food and Drug
Administration. “There’s no difference between Perrier bottling water, Gerber making baby food, or Miller brewing beer.
When you incorporate water from the basin into a product,
it’s no longer water per se.” And Brendan O’Rourke, an Ice
Mountain plant manager, adds that the 262 million gallons it
wants to pump are less than 1 percent of the annual recharge
rate of the local watershed, equivalent to just 14 minutes of
evaporation from the surface of Lake Michigan.
For their part, scientists opposed to the project argue that
Nestlé’s pumping has already lowered the local water table
and that northern pike are having trouble spawning in a
stream fed by Sanctuary Spring. Jim Olson argues that the
Ice Mountain plant should reduce its water consumption to
100 gallons per minute or less, not increase it to 400 gallons.
“Every gallon removed is needed for the stream to sustain
itself,” he states. “The right to withdraw groundwater does not
include the right to diminish . . . existing or future uses.”
To the surprise of many, Michigan state court judge
Lawrence Root bought that argument and upheld the MCWC’s
lawsuit. Ruling that the environment is at risk no matter how
much water Nestlé draws out, he ordered the pumps turned
off. Two years later, an appellate court reversed Judge Root’s
decision, and MCWC and Nestlé subsequently entered an
agreement limiting Nestlé’s withdrawals from Sanctuary
Spring to 250 gallons per minute—although there has been
some legal skirmishing between the two antagonists since
then. In the meantime, however, the political tide has turned
against Nestlé. Small towns in Maine and California have
opposed its building new bottled water plants in their jurisdictions; Congress has held hearings into the diversion of
groundwater by bottled water companies and other businesses; and Michigan has passed legislation that, among
other things, makes it virtually impossible for operations such
as the Ice Mountain plant to remove more than 100,000 gallons of groundwater per day.
Discussion Questions
1. Should people in Michigan be concerned about how, and
by whom, the state’s ground water is used? In your view,
what issues of justice does this case raise?
2. Would Nestlé’s pumping 262 million gallons of water per
year from Sanctuary Spring constitute “reasonable use”?
Is the company treating either local residents or the Native
American tribes unfairly, or would it be unfair to restrict
Nestlé’s use of water from the spring?
3. Is groundwater a public resource, the use of which is
appropriate for society to regulate? Or is it the property
of those who own the land to use as they see fit? Who
has the strongest claim on groundwater—the owners of
the land from which it is pumped, the original inhabitants of the area (that is, the local Indian tribes), local
residents, citizens of the whole Great Lakes region, or all
Americans?
4. Assess this case from the perspective of the utilitarian,
libertarian, and Rawlsian theories of justice. How would
each address the case? Which theory’s approach do you
find the most helpful or illuminating?
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