You, the CEO, discover that the supplier you have been using for your APPLEBABY juice has been supplying sugar water, not apple juice. You told your superiors that your division would make $7m in profit this year. If you dump the fake juice and buy real juice it will cost you $750K hitting your bottom line. You decide to dump the fake juice at half price in overseas markets where the FDA can’t reach you. By the time the FDA did intervene, you had offloaded all but 20,000 cases of the fake juice.

1) Utilitarian reasoning.

Read the Case Exporting Pollution at the end of Chapter 3 in Boatright.  Analyze this as a utilitarian using the following questions. Use the chart below.  Mark effects as shown below

Great positive effect ++

Some positive effect +

Negligible effect  0

Some negatigve effect –

Great negative effects – –

1. What are the possible actions? (Fill in the options)
2. Who is affected? (Put those in first column)
3. What are the positive and negative effects?
4. What action would you recommend?

Who is affected

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Minimum wage workers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Fairness

You, the CEO, discover that the supplier you have been using for your APPLEBABY juice has been supplying sugar water, not apple juice. You told your superiors that your division would make $7m in profit this year. If you dump the fake juice and buy real juice it will cost you $750K hitting your bottom line.

You decide to dump the fake juice at half price in overseas markets where the FDA can’t reach you. By the time the FDA did intervene, you had offloaded all but 20,000 cases of the fake juice.

•       Evaluate this CEO’s action using Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

 

3) Virtue Ethics

What virtues do you need in business?

·       Identify the virtues you think you need in business, and why.

·       Rank your answers from most important to least important

 

4) Home Depot

In the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, individual price-gougers were selling building materials at wildly inflated prices, but not Home Depot. Following the hurricane, the store continued to sell plywood at pre-hurricane prices. Even when plywood wholesale prices increased by 28 percent, Home Depot announced that it would sell plywood, roofing materials, and plastic sheeting at cost and take no profit. Home Depot negotiated with its suppliers to reduce prices to pre-hurricane levels in order to enable the store to maintain its retail prices.

 

a)     Justify Home Depot’s decision on utilitarian principles ie greatest good for greatest number.

b)     Justify Home Depot’s decision on  rights morality – inherent rights that must be respected.

c)     Justify Home Depot’s decision on  virtue ethics

d)     Justify Home Depot’s decision on  Kantian ethics.

 

5) Whistleblowing

Read the case a whistleblower accepts a deal in Boatright. Prepare a case study using the following format:

Decision: Was the whistleblower right to accept the deal?

Facts:   What facts presented in this case are relevant to the decision. Choose only the important ones (no more than 8, usually 4-6)

Ethical Reasoning:  Apply an ethical theory:  (Utiitarian, Fairness or Virtue) support your decision.  So if you think that the consequences f the decision to accept the deal are such that the good outweighs the bad, you would use Utilitarian reasoning and show that. If you are using fairness, you need to show what your maxim is and how it can be universalized. If you are using Virtue, you have to describe the options in terms of effect on the actor’s character.

Opposing Point of View: Write a justification for a decision that would he the opposite of yours.

Catholic Social Teaching (CST): Apply one or more of the Six Principles from the Vocation of the Business Leader (VBL) to this case