Business ethics is perhaps one of the most personal and emotional areas in business decision making. Business ethics can be confusing and complex because a right or wrong answer often does not exist. Because this area is so emotional and controversial, it is extremely important to use your critical thinking skills when thinking about business ethics. It would be very easy to make arguments based on your gut reaction to cases such as the Bhopal gas incident.You should, however, carefully use your critical thinking skills to draw an informed conclusion.The following questions can help you begin to understand the complexity surrounding business ethics.
1. As critical thinkers, you have learned that ambiguous words—words that have multiple possible meanings—can cause confusion in the legal environment. Perhaps the best example of ambiguity in the legal environment is the phrase social responsibility. What definitions of responsibility can you generate? Clue: Consider the Bhopal incident. Do you think Union Carbide would have the same definition of social responsibility as the families of the Indian accident victims?
2. It is common for individuals, businesses, judges, and juries each to use different meanings of the phrase social responsibility. Preferences for certain ethical norms might account for these different meanings. If executives of a company thought that security was extremely important, how might their definition of social responsibility be affected? Clue: Remember the definitions of security in Chapter 1. If Union Carbide valued security, how might the company treat the victims of the Bhopal incident?
3. Your friend discovers that you are taking a class on the legal environment of business. He says, “I’m extremely angry at the cigarette companies. They knew that cigarettes cause cancer. Don’t those companies have a responsibility to protect us?” Because you are trained in critical thinking, you know that his question does not have a simple answer. Keeping your critical thinking skills in mind, how would you intelligently respond to his question? Clue: Consider the critical thinking questions about ambiguity, ethical norms, and missing information.