BLAW 3201 Chapter : Chapter 2 Business Ethics And The Social Responsibility Of Business
Chapter 2—Business Ethics and the Social Responsibility of Business
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1. Ethics can be broadly defined as the study of what is good or right for human beings.
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2. The study of business ethics has several central authorities.
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3. Because there are no universal, clear-cut standards to apply to ethical analysis, it is impossible to
make meaningful ethical judgments.
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4. Not everything that is legal is also morally correct.
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5. An ethical relativist looks to a central authority, such as the Bible, to guide her in ethical decision
making.
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6. The two major forms of utilitarianism are situational and a priori.
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7. Situational ethics judges a person's ethics, and it does so from the perspective of the actor.
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8. Jeremy Bentham was not a proponent of utilitarianism.
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9. There are no important criticisms of utilitarianism.
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10. A leading proponent of the utilitarian approach to ethics was the eighteenth-century philosopher
Immanuel Kant.
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11. Deontologists are sometimes criticized for rigidity and excessive formalism.
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12. Intuitionism holds that rational persons possess inherent powers to assess the correctness of
actions.
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13. In employment relationships, ethical issues arise regarding safety and compensation of workers,
privacy, and the legitimacy of whistle-blowing.
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14. Harvard philosopher John Rawls stressed liberty as the most important obligation owed by a
society to its members.
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15. To a libertarian, it is not unjust for some people to accumulate fortunes while others live in
poverty.
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16. Although corporations are not persons but artificial entities created by the state, it is clear that
they can and should be held morally accountable.
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17. Corporations are generally held to a higher standard of accountability than are public bodies.
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18. According to Milton Friedman, the social obligation of a corporation is to return as much money
as possible to its shareholders.
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19. According to Adam Smith, the capitalistic system is composed of economic motivation, private
productive property, free enterprise, free markets, competition, and limited government.
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20. Most philosophers now agree that people can discover fundamental ethical rules by applying
careful a priori reasoning.
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21. The theory of distributive justice analyzes society through a “veil of ignorance.”
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22. What is unjust to a social egalitarian will also be unjust to a libertarian.
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23. From a Kantian perspective, for an action to be moral, it must be possible for it to be made into a
universal law and it must respect the autonomy and rationality of all human beings.
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24. Under a Kantian approach to ethics, a person should not lie to colleagues unless that person
supports the right of all colleagues to lie to one another.
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25. Under a strict utilitarian approach, it is ethical to force an individual to participate in a painful
medical experiment if the purpose of the experiment is to develop a cure that will benefit large
numbers of people.
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26. Kant's approach, like that of ethical fundamentalists, asserts that universal laws stem from the
direct pronouncements of God.
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27. Bill would like to propose to the board of directors of Midway Corporation that it distribute five
percent of its pre-tax yearly income to feed the poor. To Milton Friedman and others, Bill's
proposal might be considered unethical, because it violates the purpose for which the corporation
was established.
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28. According to one argument in favor of corporate social responsibility, the more responsibly
companies act, the less the government must regulate them.
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29. Andrew Carnegie was a believer in corporate social responsibility.
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30. Situational ethics is essentially the same as ethical relativism.
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31. Deontological theories assess good and evil in terms of the consequences of actions rather than by
the motives that lead to them.
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32. Utilitarian notions underlie cost-benefit analysis.
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