978-0205017669 Chapter 1 Lecture Note Part 2

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Moral reasoning refers to the reasoning process by which human behaviors, institutions,

or policies are judged to be in accordance with or in violation of moral standards. Moral

reasoning always involves three essential components: (a) an understanding of what

reasonable moral standards require, prohibit, value, or condemn; (b) evidence or

information that shows that a particular person, policy, institution, or behavior has the kinds

of features that these moral standards require, prohibit, value, or condemn; and (c) a

conclusion or moral judgment that the person, policy, institution, or behavior is prohibited

or required, right or wrong, just or unjust, valuable or condemnable, and so on.

To evaluate the adequacy of moral reasoning, ethicists employ three main criteria:

1. Moral reasoning must be logical.

2. Factual evidence must be accurate, relevant, and complete.

3. Moral standards must be consistent.

Inconsistency between moral standards can be uncovered and corrected by examining

situation s in which these moral standards require incompatible things. For example, if

faced with two standards that that I hold and they come in conflict with each other at some

point, the situation will reveal an inconsistency between the two moral standards, meaning I

cannot do both.

Consistency refers not only to the fact that one’s standards must be able to coexist with

each other, but also to the requirement that one must be willing to accept the consequences

of applying one’s moral standards consistently to others in similar circumstances. The

consistency requirement is, in fact, the basis of an important critical method in ethics: the

use of counterexamples and hypothetical examples.

This consistency requirement can be phrased as follows:

If I judge that a certain person is morally justified (or unjustified) in doing A in

circumstance C, then I must accept that it is morally justified (or unjustified) for any

other person:

(a) To perform any act relevantly similar to A

(b) In any circumstances relevantly similar to C.

Moral reasoning is only one of the processes that lead up to ethical or unethical behavior.

James Rest, a moral psychologist holds the view that four main processes precede ethical

action:

1. Recognizing or becoming aware that we are faced with an ethical issue or situation.

2. Making a judgment about what the ethical course of action is

3. Forming an intention or decision to do or not to do what we judge is right.

4. Carrying out or acting on the intention or decision we have made.

These may or may not happen sequentially. However, it is not always easy to distinguish

them from each other, especially if they happen simultaneously. Notice that moral

reasoning is only concerned with the second process.

When we see a situation, we start to think of what a person is expected to do in that

situation. Besides business, legal, and personal frames, we also apply moral frames to

situations. Researchers have identified six criteria that we can and do use to decide

whether to frame a situation as an ethical situation that calls for ethical reasoning. The six

criteria are:

1. Does the situation involve the infliction of serious harm on one or more people?

2. Is the harm concentrated on its victims so that each victim will, or already has,

sustained a significant amount of harm”

3. Is it likely that the harm will occur (or has actually occurred?

4. Are the victims proximate, i.e., close or near to us?

5. Will the harm occur fairly soon (or has it already occurred)?

6. Is there a possibility that the infliction of the harm possibly violate the moral

standards we or most people accept?

The more of these questions that we answer affirmatively the more “intense” or “important”

the situation is for us and the more likely that we will frame it as an ethical situation that

calls for the use of ethical standards and ethical reasoning.

Rationalizing our Actions

We will now look at four main processes that lead up to ethical (or unethical) action. We

will first look at impediments that can hamper these processes.

The First Step toward Ethical Behavior: Recognizing a Situation as an Ethical Situation

We encounter ethical situations every day. But before we can start to think about those

issues, we first have to recognize that the situation we have encountered is one that calls

for ethical reasoning. It might be a personal, business, legal or family situation. Each will

require us to frame them in those terms. In addition we also apply moral or ethical frames

of the situation.

While there are many ways of improving our ability to recognize whether a situation

requires ethical thinking, there are also impediments that get in the way of recognition.

Albert Bandura identified six forms of “moral disengagement,” that prevent a person from

recognizing or becoming aware that a situation is an ethical one. The main forms are:

Euphemistic Labeling – We can use euphemisms to change or veil the way we see a

situation we have encountered. If we use the word “down sizing” instead of “firing” we

frame it as a business issue, rather than an ethical issue and change how we see it.

Rationalizing our actions – We can tell ourselves that the harm we intend is justified

because we are pursuing a worthy cause. So, we need not look at our actions through an

ethical framework.

Diminishing Comparisons – Comparing the situation in the context of other larger evils, we

diminish the magnitude of our own wrongdoing and make the harms that we inflict appear

minor or inconsequential and avoid looking at it through an ethical frame.

Displacement of Responsibility – By claiming that whoever told us to do the harm was

primarily responsible for the harm, we mentally remove ourselves from the chain of actors

responsible for the harm. Doing this, we do not have to apply an ethical frame to my

actions since “I wasn’t really involved in injuring the customer.”

Diffusion of Responsibility – If I see myself as playing only a small role in a large group that

is responsible for the harm; I can obscure my involvement in the activities that harm

someone. Then I can say it was really the team that did the harm and I only had a small

role in the situation.

Disregarding or distorting the harm – When we deny, disregard, or distort the harm that our

actions produced, then we do not have to frame our actions as needing ethical scrutiny, and

we discredit the evidence.

Dehumanizing the Victim – If we can think of the victims we injure as not real or not fully

human beings with human feelings and concerns, we can avoid seeing that we are harming

real people, we don’t have to think of our actions through an ethical frame.

Redirecting Blame – We can blame what we have done on our adversary or on the

circumstances so that we see ourselves as an innocent victim which is provoked by others

or circumstances.

These six forms of moral disengagement are obstacles, which without our knowledge, can

prevent us from framing the situation and thereby prevent us from thinking about it in

moral or ethical terms.

The Second step toward Ethical Behavior: making a judgment

Before we judge a situation we should try to gather such information about it that is

accurate, relevant and complete. However our attempts to gather the information might be

affected by biases that prevent us from getting the information that we need. Several

forms of bias have been studied and are put into three groups:

1. Biased theories about the world, refers to beliefs we have about how the world

works, the causes that make things happen, and how our actions affect the world.

Because the world floods us with such complicated information, we cannot think

about it unless we simplify it. One way that we simplify it is by limiting the amount of

information that we allow ourselves to think about. This leads to creating biases that

inhibits our ability to take in all necessary information to clearly evaluate the

situation.

2. Biased theories about other people include the beliefs we have about how we differ

from others, or what the members of certain groups are like. This ethnocentrism

leads to the belief that “our” way is good, while what “they” do, seems foreign,

strange and less good. This can possibly lead a person to stereotype members of

other groups.

3. Biased theories about oneself. Research has shown that our own views of ourselves

tend to be inaccurate. Being unrealistic we believe we are more capable, insightful,

courteous, honest, ethical and fair to others. We are overconfident about our ability

to control random events. Thereby, we overestimate the likelihood that we will

experience good events and underestimate the likelihood that we will be the ones

who experience bad events leading with the result of taking unnecessary risks.

There are then a number of biases about us, others, and the world that lead us to mistaken

beliefs about situations we encounter. These biases can prevent us from making decisions

based upon solid information. Thinking we are making right decisions, when in fact, we

might be completely wrong.

The third step toward Ethical Behavior: Deciding to do what is Right

Even when I have determined what the morally right and morally wrong course of action

should be in a given situation, there is no guarantee that I will do what is right. People

often do what is unethical, even when they know it is unethical. The essential nature of evil

is knowing something is wrong but deciding to do it anyway. There are a number of factors

that influence whether we decide to do what we know is right, or decide instead to do what

we know is wrong.

Ethical climate refers to the belief an organization’s members have about how they are

expected to behave. Here are two examples:

1. Employees in an “egoistic” organization feel they are expected to be self-seeking

and so they are.

2. Employees in an organization with a “benevolent” climate feel they are expected

to do what is best for all stakeholders, i.e. employees, customers, suppliers and

the community.

Not surprisingly, employees in an egoistic organization find it harder to make ethical

decisions about what they know is right than do employees in a benevolent organization.

Organizations with a strong ethical culture make it easier for us to do what is right. While

organizations with a strong business culture can make it harder to do what is right.

Organizations can also generate a form of “moral seduction” that exerts pressure on an

ethical person to make decisions that he or she knows is wrong. Psychologists have found

that moral seduction occurs one step at a time with each successive decision being more

serious than the previous decision, until step-by-step the person finds himself deeply

involved in unethical practices and so compromised that he feels he must continue his

involvement.

The Fourth Step toward Ethical Behavior: Carrying Out one’s Decision

Good intentions do not always result in good behavior because we often fail to do what we

intended. When the time comes to act, I may lack the determination to do what is right.

Factors that influence whether a person acts on the moral decisions he or she intended

include:

1. Weakness of will. This refers to the inability to regulate our actions so that we

fail to do what we know is right when emotions, desires, or external pressures

tempt us. On the other hand, the ability to be resistant to impulses and to follow

one’s own convictions is referred to as “ego strength”.

2. A second important factor that affects those whether a person will decide to do

what the person judges is wrong is their belief about their locus of control. Locus

of control refers to whether a person believes that what happens to him or her is

primarily the result of external forces such as other powerful people, or luck, or

circumstances. People who believe they are in control of their own lives tend to

have better control of their behavior and are more likely to do what is right,

whereas those who believe that what happens to them is not in their control, but

is determined by external forces, are more often swayed by external forces to do

what they do not think is right.

3. The third factor that can keep a person from doing what he or she knows to be

right is the ability for that person to obey an authority figure, even when they

know, or suspect they know, what they are doing is wrong. The Milgram

experiment was performed several years ago by psychologist Stanley Milgram.

He set up an experiment with actors and unsuspecting subjects. He tested the

subjects to see how far they would go in “shocking” a person with a fake “shock

machine” to the point of even killing a person. This was performed in the

presence of and with pressure from an authority figure. The experiment showed

that ordinary people would follow orders, even when asked to do what they

believed was morally wrong, even to the point of killing a person, when there was

pressure from an authority figure. In light of the experiment, it is easy to see

how in business organizations, many people are likely to feel they have to go

along with what managers ask them to do, even when they believe it is morally

wrong.

There are impediments to carrying out the decision to do what is right, i.e., peoples’

weakness of will, their views about whether they are in control of what happens to them,

and their willingness to obey an authority figure. There are other impediments to doing

what we think is right: pressures from our peers put on us to do what we know is wrong,

fears of the personal costs of doing what we know is right, and limited self control.

Impediments can hamper any of the four processes leading up to ethical behavior. Being

armed with this knowledge, we can be better equipped to overcome the impediments.

1.4 Moral Responsibility and Blame

Moral responsibility is directed not only at judgments concerning right or wrong.

Sometimes, they are directed at determining whether a person or organization is morally

responsible for having done something wrong. People are not always responsible for their

wrongful or injurious acts: moral responsibility is incurred only when a person knowingly

and freely acts in an immoral way or fails to act in a moral way.

Ignorance and inability to do otherwise are two conditions, called excusing condition that

completely eliminates a person’s moral responsibility for causing wrongful injury. Ignorance

and inability do not always excuse a person, however. When one deliberately keeps oneself

ignorant to escape responsibility, that ignorance does not excuse the wrongful injury. A

person is morally responsible for an injury or a wrong if:

1. The person caused or helped cause it, or failed to prevent it when he could and should

have;

2. The person did so knowing what he or she was doing;

3. The person did so of his own free will.

Ignorance may concern the relevant facts or the relevant moral standards. Generally,

ignorance of the facts eliminates moral responsibility. This is because moral responsibility

requires freedom, which is impossible in the case of ignorance of the relevant facts. Inability

eliminates responsibility because a person cannot have a moral obligation to do something

over which he or she has no control. A person is NOT morally responsible for an injury or a

wrong if:

1. The person did not cause and could not prevent the injury or wrong;

2. The person did not know he was inflicting the injury or the wrong;

3. The person did not inflict the injury or the wrong of his own free will

In addition to the excusing conditions, there are also four mitigating factors that diminish

moral responsibility. They are:

1. Circumstances that minimize (but do not remove) a person’s involvement in an act.

2. Circumstances that leave a person uncertain (but not unsure) about what he or she

is doing;

3. Circumstances that make it difficult (but not impossible) for the person to avoid

doing it;

4. Circumstances show that the matter involved was of a minor nature

The extents to which these mitigating circumstances can diminish an agent’s responsibility

depend on the seriousness of the injury. Generally, the more serious the injury, the less the

mitigating circumstances will diminish responsibility.

Can there be an ethical business situation that might be called cooperating with evil.

Within the modern corporations, responsibility for a corporate act is often distributed among

many cooperating parties. If a manager orders something illegal and employees carry out

those orders, one party supplies that means and the other carries out the act, another

group conceals it. The possible variations on cooperation in an evil act are endless. The

determination for responsibility is the same if I knowingly and freely bring about the wrong,

even though I rely on other things and people, I am fully morally responsible for the wrongs

that I inflict, even though the responsibility is shared by others.

In this case, I cannot hide behind the loyal agent argument. If I knowingly and of my own

free will cause an injury, the fact that I was following orders at the time does not change

the reality that I fulfilled the three conditions that qualify me as morally responsible for my

actions.

Extra Resources

1. “The Dark Side of Chocolate” (2010) is a 47 minute documentary on the slavery of

children and others in western Africa, particularly in Ivory Coast. It is available from

The International Labor Rights Forum (www.LaborRights.org) at:

https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4058/donate_page/darkside .

2. “The Corporation” (2004) is a 145 minute Documentary on the corporation with

interviews of Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and many others.

3. “Inside Job” (2011) is a 120 minute documentary on the Wall Street and banking

malfeasance that helped create the global financial crisis.

4. “Quiet Rage: the Stanford Prison Experiment” is available for purchase from

Prisonexp.org at www.prisonexp.org/documentary.htm or streaming on Google Video

and YouTube; “The Milgram Experiment Revisited” (2007) is an ABC Primetime video

available at the online abcnews Store, while “Milgram’s Obedience to Authority

Experiment” (2009) a BBC documentary and “Milgram Experiment” (1962) can both

be streamed at YouTube.

5. “Wal-Mart the high cost of low price” (2005) is a 98 minute documentary that

uncovers a retail giant’s impact on families and communities struggling to fight a

goliath. The video tells about a working mother, other company employees, and the

owner of a small Missouri family that loses its business after Wal-Mart is given over

$2 million to open its doors down the road. Producer/Director Robert Greenwald and

Brave New Films . Read more in the director’s introduction .

6. A website that describes the work that Merck did when faced with the discovery of

the possible medicine that would eradicate river blindness

http://www.suite101.com/content/eliminating–river-blindness-a25397

7. A website showing that even corporations that provide altruistic efforts can

sometimes engage in what appears to be a different behavior in other situations.

The website shows how Merck dealt with the VIOXX product liability lawsuits.

http://www.merck.com/newsroom/news-release-archive/corporate/2007_1109.html.

Questions for Class Discussion

1. Why did the officials at Merck finally decide to produce the “river blindness” medicine,

even though it seemed unlikely that they would recoup their investment? Should

corporations be required to act as Merck did?

2. What is the distinction between ethics and morality? Discuss the different meanings of

the word “ethics,” and encourage students to come up with examples that elucidate the

distinctions between these definitions.

3. What would you have done in Vandivier’s case? Is he to blame for any injuries that

resulted from the faulty brakes, or are his actions excusable? Are there any mitigating

circumstances that lessen his moral culpability?

4. What are the six characteristics that distinguish moral standards? Why is each of them

necessary to define moral standards in general?

5. What are the three basic types of ethical issues? Come up with an example of an ethical

issue for each type.

6. How do moral obligations apply to business organizations? Can companies be held

accountable for what they do, or are the individuals who make up the company the

ones we must hold accountable? Discuss the major arguments concerning corporate

responsibility.

7. What special ethical issues face multinational corporations? How should they, and

society, respond to these issues?

8. What is ethical relativism? What are the difficulties with the theory? What does it have

to offer us, even if it seems largely mistaken?

9. What are the three criteria used to evaluate the adequacy of moral reasoning? Have

students apply the criteria to a series of moral judgments to evaluate each example’s

relative adequacy.

10. What are the objections to bringing ethics into business? What are arguments in favor

of doing so? Which side is more persuasive?

11. What considerations are relevant when we assign blame for an injurious act? What is

the distinction between excusing conditions and mitigating circumstances?

12. When evaluating an ethical dilemma, does the closeness of a stakeholder relationship

influence the outcome of how it is dealt with?

Activities and Assignments

1. Using the Merck “river blindness” example, have students in small groups take on the

roles of Merck officials and consider the issue themselves. What are the moral standards

that support their view? How will they balance their competing responsibilities to society

and to their shareholders? This activity would also work with the class as a whole, unless

it is too large.

2. Consider a real-life scenario of a large multinational corporation in the face of the special

ethical concerns mentioned in the chapter. Assign students (or groups of students) to

different corporations and ask them to investigate how their multinational has responded

to the issues raised in the chapter. Have them decide, as a group, which firm or firms

are more ethical, and see if they can find any correlation between their relative moral

level and their profitability.

3. Have students identify some new ethical issues raised by new technologies. Then have

them identify the moral standards each issue relates to.

4. Break students up into six different groups, corresponding to the stages of moral

development outlined by Kohlberg. You may also form another group enacting Gilligan’s

ethics of care. Then give the class a series of hypothetical examples and ask each group

to respond appropriately, explaining how they determine what the moral thing to do

would be.