“To be able under all circumstances to practise five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.” - Confucius

BAM321 Business Ethics and Social Responsibility Session 6 Business and Management

Agenda for today Rights and duties Confucius on virtues Rawls on social justice Your issues

Kant ( ) 1.Only act on rules that you would be willing to see everyone follow. 2.Act so that you treat all humans always as an end and never as a means only. 3.Act as if you were a member of an ideal kingdom of ends in which you were both subject and sovereign. The categorical imperative.

What issues do Kant’s ideas raise for business? Task

Issues for thought Slavery. Child labour. What would utilitarian thinking say about these? And applying Kant’s categorical imperative?

UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 1 –All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Two factual claims, and one moral claim

UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 23 –Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment –Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. Several articles are to do with business

UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 23 –Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 23 –Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. Article 24 –Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Negative freedom Freedom from interference –The right to be left alone to make one’s own choices –Imposes duties on others to leave me alone –Should I be free to turn up for work drunk and so get fired? –Do my flatmates have a duty not to stop me from going?

Positive freedom Having the ability to achieve certain ends Article 24 –Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

A Confucian view Freedom is achieved not by having more choices but by overcoming one’s lower desires… And internalising community norms – becoming a good person Seung-hwan Lee, 1996

Justice We have tended to consider individual behaviour –eg lying, management decisions. What about the ethical status of the economic system as whole?

Distributive justice Boatright suggests justice is relevant to this issue in connection with the distribution of benefits and burdens –Distributive justice. We may also speak of compensatory and retributive justice (also relevant to business).

Distributive justice Comparative. We compare the benefits received and burdens borne by different individuals. What benefits and burdens should be considered?

Distributive justice What benefits and burdens should be considered? How should these things be distributed?

Utilitarianism and justice Utilitarianism says we should focus on increasing utility without regard for which individuals benefit. Only if we assume diminishing marginal utility might adoption of utilitarianism lead to something like an equal distribution.

But is an equal distribution just?

The free market and justice The free market as modelled by economists leads to maximum utility. (I don’t follow Boatright’s argument at the bottom of p85 – he seems to be wrong) But free markets in practice seem to lead to quite a high degree of inequality.

The free market and justice But free markets in practice seem to lead to quite a high degree of inequality. Is the inequality observed in market economies just?

Market failure In reality some of the assumptions of the economists’ model are not satisfied. There is “market failure”. –Externalities, public goods…

Policies that correct for market failure might satisfy our concerns about the impact of economic activity on the environment. But we might still be concerned about the justice of the distribution of benefits and burdens among individuals.

John Rawls A contract theory. –If individuals would unanimously accept certain terms to govern their relations then those terms are just. Distinctive feature of Rawls’s method is the veil of ignorance.

John Rawls Suppose a completely new society is about to be constructed. Suppose you don’t know what your position will be in the new society. What features would you want that society to have? Write ideas on post-it notes. Then diamond mine!

John Rawls 1.Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. 2.Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a)to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and b)attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory A distribution is just if it was arrived at by just transfers and the original distribution was just.

Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory The condition that the original distribution must have been just is problematic. And why are property rights so important?

Directed tasks Write short essays about at least two of the issues you have logged in the past five weeks Do some reading on Rawls’s theory of justice, eg Boatright chapter 4 Keep logging!